Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a binding agreement between you and the individual operating Arbiter as a sole proprietorship (“Arbiter”, “we”, “us”), covering the Arbiter website at chess-arbiter.com, the web application at app.chess-arbiter.com, the Arbiter desktop application, and every associated API and service (together, the “Service”).

By creating an account, downloading the desktop app, or otherwise using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you are accepting on behalf of a chess federation, academy, club or other organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means that organisation.

Our Privacy Policy is incorporated into these Terms by reference and explains how personal data is handled.

• Tournament — a chess event you create in the Service, together with all data attached to it.
• Organizer — the account that creates a Tournament. The Organizer holds the owner role for it.
• Member — any account added to a Tournament with an owner, editor or viewer role.
• Candidate — a player who submits a registration through a Tournament's public entry form. Candidates do not need an account.
• Your Content — everything you or your Members put into the Service: tournament details, player and candidate records, uploaded files, standings, prize configurations, community posts and anything generated from them at your instruction.

• You must be at least 18 years old to create an account. The Service is built for arbiters and organisers, not for players to use directly. Candidates under 18 may be registered for an event by an Organizer under the conditions in section 5 — they do not create accounts.
• You may sign up with an email address and password, or with Google. Keep your credentials confidential. You are responsible for everything done through your account, and must tell us promptly at hello@chess-arbiter.com if you suspect unauthorised access.
• Account details you provide — name, email, and optionally your own FIDE and AICF IDs — must be accurate and kept current. Some features, such as prefilling norm forms, read from them.
• One account per person. Do not share a login across a team; add co-arbiters as Members instead, so that the audit trail attributes each action to the person who took it.

The Service currently includes the following features. Which of them you can use depends on your plan (section 6).

• Tournaments and team roles — create tournaments, invite co-arbiters by email, and assign per-tournament owner, editor or viewer permissions.
• Membership analysis — submit a batch of FIDE and AICF player IDs; the Service retrieves the corresponding public records and returns an Excel report.
• Online entries — publish a public registration form for a tournament, collect candidate details and proof of payment, and confirm, waitlist or reject each entry. Registrations export to Excel and to Swiss-Manager's player-import XML.
• Pairing sheets — map board ranges to arbiters, upload each round's pairings, and download a per-arbiter workbook.
• Prize book and prize list — define prize categories, upload final standings, and generate an allocation that resolves overlapping categories.
• Norm forms — generate FIDE FA1 and IA1 arbiter norm report forms as Word documents.
• Live broadcast — capture game PGN files and upload them to an FTP server you control. This runs in the desktop app only.
• Rulebook AI assistant — ask questions about the FIDE Arbiters' Manual and receive answers with the relevant sections cited.
• Community discussions — post questions, comment and react alongside other arbiters.
• Audit logs — an append-only record of changes made to each tournament.

We add, change and occasionally retire features. Section 16 explains how we handle changes that materially reduce what you have paid for.

Data about other people

Almost everything you put into the Service is personal data about somebody else — players, candidates, co-arbiters and prize winners.

• You confirm you have a lawful basis — consent or otherwise — to collect the data you submit and to have us process it, including any custom questions you add to your registration form. Do not collect fields you do not need for the event.
• You must give candidates a privacy notice of your own that identifies you as the organiser, and must handle their access, correction and deletion requests. We will support you, but we cannot answer for you.
• Minors. Junior events mean you will routinely hold data about children. Where the law requires it — including under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 — you are responsible for obtaining verifiable parental or guardian consent before collecting a child's details, and for not using them for tracking or targeted advertising.
• Do not upload sensitive data the Service was not built for: government identity documents, health records, financial account credentials, or anything similar. The registration form's custom fields are free text and are not designed to safeguard such data.

Running the event

• You are responsible for the accuracy of what you enter and for the decisions you take from it. Arbiter automates paperwork; it does not arbitrate.
• You remain bound by the rules of FIDE, AICF and any other federation or state association governing your event, including their rules on eligibility, titles, norms and publication of results. Nothing the Service outputs overrides them.
• Only invite Members who should have access to a tournament, and remove them when they should not. Roles are enforced by the Service, but who holds them is your call.

Tiers

Online entries are available through a Quotation only; there is no self-serve upgrade path for it. Contact us at hello@chess-arbiter.com for a quote. A Quotation attaches to a tournament, not to a person, so every Member of that tournament gets its features regardless of their own plan — and that access never carries over to their other tournaments.

Trial

• The trial runs for 7 days from the moment you start it, is available once per account, and does not require a payment method. It does not convert into a paid plan automatically — you choose whether to subscribe.
• We may withdraw or vary trial eligibility, for instance where we detect duplicate accounts created to obtain repeated trials.

Payment and renewal

• Pro is billed in advance through Razorpay, and renews automatically for successive periods until cancelled. You authorise the recurring debit by setting up a mandate at checkout, and receive a pre-debit notification before each renewal as India's recurring-payment rules require. Current prices are shown on the pricing section and at checkout.
• Prices are exclusive of taxes unless stated otherwise. You are responsible for any applicable taxes, and for giving us correct billing information.
• We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice by email. Increases take effect at your next renewal; if you do not accept one, cancel before that date.
• If a renewal payment fails, your subscription enters a short grace period during which access continues and we email you. If payment still has not succeeded when the grace period ends, paid features stop.

Cancellation and refunds

• You can cancel at any time from the billing page. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for — you keep access until then.
• Payments are otherwise non-refundable, including for partial periods, unused time, and Quotations for tournaments that are cancelled or postponed. Where a payment was taken in error, or a refund is required by law, we will make it.
• A Quotation covers one tournament for the validity period stated when it is issued. Once that period ends, that tournament's paid features become read-only.
• Full details — including how to cancel, which refunds we grant, and how long they take to reach you — are in our Cancellation & Refund Policy, which forms part of these Terms and governs where the two overlap.

• You publish your own UPI ID, payment QR code, bank details or instructions on the registration form. Candidates pay you directly and attach a reference or screenshot as proof. The Service records that proof and your verification decision; it does not verify, hold, transmit or settle funds.
• You alone are responsible for collecting entry fees, issuing receipts, complying with tax and financial regulation, and handling refunds, chargebacks and disputes with candidates. Direct entry-fee disputes to the organiser, not to us.
• Where a Quotation records a per-entrant convenience fee, that figure is part of the commercial record of the quote. It is not collected by the Service from candidates.
• You must not represent to candidates that Arbiter guarantees, insures or holds their payment.

• Membership analysis works by retrieving publicly available player records published by FIDE and AICF and presenting them back to you. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for FIDE or AICF.
• Results are indicative, not authoritative. Source records may be stale, incomplete or temporarily unavailable, and a source site may change its structure without notice. Before refusing an entry, disqualifying a player or filing a report, verify the position against the official source.
• Only submit IDs of players connected to an event you are authorised to run. Do not use the feature for bulk enumeration of records, to build a competing database, or for any purpose unrelated to running your tournament.
• Batch sizes are capped by plan, and we may apply further rate limits to keep load on the source sites reasonable.

• The assistant answers questions using retrieval over the FIDE Arbiters' Manual and a third-party large language model. Your question, the retrieved passages and your conversation history are sent to our AI providers to produce the answer.
• Answers are informational and may be wrong, incomplete or out of date. They are not an official FIDE interpretation, not legal advice, and not a substitute for the current published rules or your own judgement as an arbiter. Always check the cited section before acting on an answer, and never present an answer as an official ruling.
• Do not enter personal data about players, confidential complaints, disciplinary details or anything else you would not want sent to a third-party AI provider.
• The Arbiters' Manual remains FIDE's copyrighted work. The assistant quotes from it to answer your questions; it does not grant you any rights in it.
• We may cap usage of the assistant to keep costs sustainable, and will tell you where a limit applies.

• Excel reports, prize lists, pairing workbooks, Swiss-Manager exports and FA1/IA1 norm documents are produced mechanically from the data you supply. Their contents are only as good as that data.
• Norm forms in particular: the Service produces a filled template for you to check, sign and submit. Event statistics and signatory details are entered by you. We do not submit anything to FIDE, do not verify norm eligibility, and cannot guarantee that a generated form will be accepted. Confirm the current official form and requirements with FIDE before you file.
• Where a required field is missing, the Service will tell you rather than produce a partial document. A document that generates successfully has still not been reviewed by anyone but you.
• Prize allocation follows the categories and filters you configure. Review the allocation before announcing or paying prizes; the final decision is the arbiter's.

• The broadcast feature captures game files locally and uploads them to an FTP or FTPS server. You must own that server or be authorised to write to it, and you are responsible for anything uploaded to it.
• FTP credentials you enter are encrypted before storage. Even so, prefer a dedicated account scoped to the upload directory, and rotate it after your event.
• You are responsible for holding the rights to broadcast the games, including any arrangement with the players, the organiser or the federation where one is required.
• The desktop application is licensed to you, not sold — a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use it with the Service. Do not decompile, redistribute or resell it. It may install updates automatically.
• Broadcast capture requires the desktop application; the browser version can display status but cannot drive uploads.

• Posts, comments and reactions are visible to other signed-in users alongside your display name. Treat the discussion area as public and permanent-by-default.
• Do not post personal data about players or candidates, allegations against named individuals, or anything confidential to an event. Describe situations, not people.
• Keep it civil and on topic: no harassment, discrimination, spam, advertising, or off-topic content.
• We may remove content or restrict posting access at our discretion, with or without notice, but we are under no obligation to monitor, moderate or retain anything posted.
• Advice from other users is their opinion, not ours. Verify it before you rely on it.

You must not, and must not permit anyone else to:

• use the Service for a tournament or dataset you are not authorised to handle;
• attempt to access another account, tournament or entry — including by guessing invitation tokens, quotation codes or entry links;
• probe, scan, overload or interfere with the Service or its infrastructure, or bypass rate limits, plan caps or access controls;
• scrape or bulk-extract data from the Service, or use it to build a competing product;
• reverse engineer, decompile or create derivative works from the Service, except to the extent that restriction is unenforceable by law;
• resell, sublicense or provide the Service to third parties as your own, other than by inviting Members to your tournaments;
• upload malware, or content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory or obscene;
• use the Service to send unsolicited messages, or to collect data for marketing unrelated to your event;
• misrepresent your affiliation with FIDE, AICF, any federation, or with us.

• You own Your Content. We claim no ownership in it.
• You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, process and display Your Content strictly to operate and support the Service for you — including generating reports, sending invitation emails on your instruction, and creating backups. The licence ends when the content is deleted, except for backups still in rotation and records we must retain by law.
• We do not sell your data, and we do not use Your Content to train AI models — ours or anyone else's.
• Content you post in the community area is additionally licensed to us and to other users to display and discuss within the Service.
• We own the Service itself: its software, design, documentation and the Arbiter name and marks. These Terms grant you a limited right to use the Service, not to our intellectual property.
• If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without obligation or compensation to you.
• Third-party marks — FIDE, AICF, Swiss-Manager and others — belong to their owners and are referred to descriptively.

The Service is built on third-party providers, including for hosting and databases, payments, transactional email, and the AI models behind the Rulebook assistant. It also retrieves data from FIDE and AICF. The current list, with what each provider receives, is in the Privacy Policy.

We choose these providers carefully and remain responsible to you for the Service, but we do not control them and are not liable for their outages, changes or acts. Where a third party's own terms apply to you — a payment provider's, for example — those terms are between you and them.

• We aim for high availability but do not commit to an uptime SLA. Planned maintenance, upstream outages and source-site changes can interrupt the Service.
• Support is by email at hello@chess-arbiter.com. Paid plans are prioritised. We do not guarantee a response time.
• Features marked beta or preview may change or be withdrawn without notice and are provided without any warranty at all.
• If we materially reduce a feature central to a plan you are paying for, we will give reasonable notice by email and, where that leaves you materially worse off, let you cancel and receive a pro-rata refund of the unused period.
• Because tournaments are time-critical, keep your own exports of anything you cannot afford to be without on the day. Export is available on every plan.

• You may stop using the Service at any time and delete your account from the settings page. Deletion is permanent — export what you need first.
• We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these Terms, if your use puts the Service or other users at risk, if payment fails beyond the grace period, or if we are required to by law. Where circumstances allow, we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right.
• After termination for a reason other than serious breach, we will give you a reasonable window — at least 30 days — to export your data before deletion, on request.
• We may discontinue the Service entirely with at least 60 days' notice, and will refund the unused portion of any prepaid period.
• Sections covering your content licence, IP, disclaimers, liability, indemnity and governing law survive termination.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.

Specifically, we do not warrant that: membership results, ratings or titles retrieved from FIDE or AICF are accurate or current; answers from the Rulebook assistant are correct; generated norm forms, prize lists or exports will be accepted by any federation, pairing program or authority; the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free; or that broadcast uploads will complete.

You remain the arbiter. Decisions about eligibility, pairings, prizes, norms and rulings are yours, and you are responsible for verifying anything the Service tells you before you act on it.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, data, or for tournament disruption, reputational harm or costs of substitute services — even if we were advised such loss was possible.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service and these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) ₹5,000. If you are on a free plan, our liability is limited to ₹5,000.

These limits apply to all theories of liability, in contract, tort or otherwise, and reflect a reasonable allocation of risk given the price of the Service.

You will indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, damages, losses and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from: Your Content; your collection or handling of personal data about players, candidates or Members; entry fees, prizes or refunds you owe; your breach of these Terms or of any federation's rules; and your use of the broadcast feature or of any server you upload to.

We may update these Terms as the Service evolves. The “last updated” date at the top always reflects the current version. For material changes we will give notice — by email to your account address or a prominent notice in the app — at least 14 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after that date means you accept the updated Terms; if you do not, stop using the Service and cancel any subscription.

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The courts at [CITY], India have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, and you and we submit to that jurisdiction.

Before starting proceedings, please email us so we can try to resolve the matter directly — most issues are settled that way.

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the rest remains in force and that provision is applied to the maximum extent permitted. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them to a successor of the business. These Terms, with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the Service.

Questions about these Terms, billing, quotations or anything else: hello@chess-arbiter.com.