Tournament terms.

Chess4prize organises chess tournaments that are played on lichess.org. We handle the entry, the payment, the eligibility rules and the prize; Lichess hosts the actual games.

Chess4prize is not affiliated with Lichess and not endorsed by them. When you play, you are on their platform under their terms as well as ours.

You need an account, and to enter a tournament you must connect a Lichess account. The Lichess link is how we check your rating; we never take your word for it.

• One Lichess account per player. One Lichess account can be linked to exactly one Chess4prize account, enforced by the database.
• The account must be yours. Entering with somebody else’s Lichess account, or playing a tournament on behalf of somebody else, is grounds for the prize to be withheld and the account closed.
• You are responsible for your sign-in details. Tell us at once if you think somebody else has them.
• Accurate information. The email address must be one you actually read — your entry code is sent there.

A minimum age applies. It has not been fixed yet, because it depends on where the operating entity is established — see the open items.

One seat in one tournament. Specifically, when you pay and are admitted, we owe you:

• your Lichess account added to that arena’s entry list, so you can actually join;
• a personal entry code, shown on the tournament page and sent by email;
• the tournament run at the stated time, with the stated time control, format and duration;
• the prize pool and the split exactly as published when you entered;
• a result taken from the games as Lichess recorded them.

An entry fee does not buy a result. It does not buy prize money, a ranking, or a rating change.

Your entry code is personal to your Lichess account. Giving it to somebody else does not let them in — it is derived from your identity and only works alongside being on the entry list.

Every tournament states its rating band, rating category, and any minimum rated games or minimum account age before you can enter. These are checked against the rating Lichess publishes for your account.

Eligibility is checked twice: when you start checkout, and again when your payment is confirmed. If the second check fails, you are not admitted and the fee is returned — see the refund policy.

Seats are limited and allocated in the order payments confirm. Starting a checkout holds a seat for a short period; abandoning it releases the seat and charges you nothing.

The prize pool and the split are fixed when the tournament is published and cannot change once seats are on sale.

Results are read from the Lichess arena. Where the arena’s final standings and anything shown here ever disagree, the arena is correct and we will correct our record.

No prize is paid automatically and none is paid without a human review. Every winner is checked against Lichess account standing before approval — see the fair-play policy. Payouts are made by hand, off-platform. Chess4prize holds no balance for you and there is no wallet.

We have not committed to a maximum time between a tournament finishing and a prize being paid. That is an open item rather than a promise we are quietly avoiding.

Tax is yours. Any tax due on prize money is your responsibility in your own country.

While playing a Chess4prize tournament you must not:

• use an engine, a database, or help from another person during a game;
• arrange results with another player, or deliberately lose;
• enter from an account that does not represent your real strength;
• interfere with the tournament, the arena, or other players.

Lichess’s fair-play rules apply to the games themselves, and their systems — not ours — are what detect engine use. What we do with their findings is set out in the fair-play policy.

We may cancel a tournament — for too few entries, a technical failure, or a problem at Lichess. If we do, every entry fee is returned in full.

We may need to move a start time. If we do, we will tell every entrant by email, and anybody who cannot make the new time can have their fee back.

We will not change the prize pool, the split, or the eligibility conditions of a tournament that already has paid entries.

We do not control Lichess. If Lichess is down, slow, or changes something that breaks a tournament, we will cancel and refund — but we cannot prevent it and we cannot compensate beyond the entry fee.

We do not control your connection. A disconnection during a game is between you and the arena’s own rules.

The platform may be unavailable. We aim to keep it running and have not committed to a specific uptime figure.

A limitation of liability normally sits here. We are not writing one before the operating entity and its jurisdiction are settled, because a clause like that has to be drafted against the law that will actually apply to it. In the meantime, your statutory rights as a consumer apply in full.

We may restrict or close an account where there is evidence of a breach of these terms — multi-accounting, result fixing, a Lichess terms-of-service mark, payment fraud, or abuse of other players or staff.

A decision like this is made by a person, recorded with a reason, and can be contested by writing to info@chess4prize.com. It is never made automatically and never on the basis of an unvalidated pattern; the fair-play policy explains what that means in practice.

You can close your own account at any time.

We may update these terms. The date at the bottom of this page always says when it last changed. Changes never apply retroactively to a tournament you have already entered — the terms you entered under are the ones that govern that entry.

At the time of writing, payments run through Stripe in test mode. No real money is taken and no real money is paid out, and the platform refuses to start with a live payment key while that is so. This section will be removed when live payments are enabled.