Chess for real money, answered

Yes. On AlgoChess both players stake real ALGO into an Algorand smart contract before the first move, play a normal blitz game (3, 5, 10 minutes), and the contract pays the winner directly — usually within about three seconds of the result. The money never sits in a site balance: it goes from the escrow straight to your wallet.

In a duel the winner takes 90% of the pot — stake 100 ALGO against 100 ALGO and a win pays 180. Against Stockfish, the multiplier depends on how far the engine is above your level, up to ×10 on the long shot.

Because nobody can decide not to pay you. The stakes are locked in a public smart contract on Algorand MainNet, the contract code decides the payout, and every settlement is a public transaction you can open in an explorer. There are no withdrawal requests and no pending balances — winning IS being paid.

10% of a duel pot, and 1% on a draw (a draw refunds both players). Against Stockfish the margin is built into the published multiplier. That is the entire business model — there are no deposit fees, withdrawal fees or subscriptions.

AlgoChess is built for exactly that player: same blitz cadences (3, 5, 10 minutes), Glicko-2 ratings recomputed from your full game history, server-side clocks, and full chess rules. The difference is that a win pays. You can keep playing on Lichess for training and come here when you want the game to count.

No. The app creates a game wallet for you in seconds, practice against every engine level is free forever, and when you want to stake you fund the wallet with ALGO from any exchange. ALGO transactions confirm in about three seconds and cost a fraction of a cent.

CHESS is the platform token, and there is exactly one way it is ever created: playing staked games. The mine opens on September 20, 2026: from then on, every decisive staked game mines CHESS for its players at a public rate that halves through twenty epochs. Nobody can buy it from us: zero premine, zero sale. It is a standard Algorand asset, so once you hold it you can send or trade it like any ASA, and its own page at /token explains the whole design. It promises rules, not returns.

The clocks run on the server, so a vanished opponent simply loses on time like anywhere else. And if a game is never completed, a timeout in the contract lets you reclaim your stake yourself — nobody, including us, can strand your money in the escrow.

Every staked game is analysed server-side, Lichess-style: move accuracy, engine-agreement rate and move-timing patterns. Sustained engine-grade play freezes an account out of new staked games, stake limits ramp up gradually for new accounts, and wallets funded by the same source are treated as one player. Settled money always follows the contract — enforcement never touches funds already decided.

Yes. Every settled game is written into the transaction that pays it: the moves, the result, and both players' ratings before and after, computed by our server with Glicko-2. The chain keeps that line for ever, so anyone can follow a rating game by game on any Algorand explorer. The rating is ours to compute; the record of it is nobody's to change.

Chess is a game of skill — the outcome is decided by how you play, which places head-to-head duels in a different category from games of chance in many jurisdictions. The Stockfish challenge pays fixed published odds, which is closer to a wager. Rules differ by country and we do not offer legal advice: you are responsible for checking that staked play is permitted where you live, and you must be of legal age.