Terms of use

ChessCentrum is a website operated from the Netherlands and offered free of charge. Every question, complaint, correction, takedown request or legal notice can be sent to the address below, which is a real, monitored mailbox. We aim to answer within five working days.

ChessCentrum is not registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce and has no VAT number, because it carries out no commercial activity: nothing is sold, no payment is taken and no advertising or affiliate income is earned. If that ever changes, the registration and VAT details will be published here before any paid service is offered.

These terms apply whenever you visit or use ChessCentrum, whether or not you have an account. By using the website, and by creating an account, you agree to them. If you do not agree, please do not use the site.

You can save or print this page at any time, so that you keep a copy you can read later. The version in force is the one published here, carrying the date shown at the top; we keep the dated older versions and will send you an earlier one on request.

These terms are published in Dutch and in all the other languages of the site. If the versions differ, the Dutch version is the one we work from, except that as a consumer you may always rely on the version in your own language where that gives you more protection.

ChessCentrum is, first of all, an aggregator. We collect information that chess organisers, clubs, federations and shops already publish, translate and structure it, and present it in all the languages of the site so that you can find it in one place instead of on dozens of separate websites.

On top of that, a signed-in user gets a small set of personal chess tools. Everything on the site is free to use, and everything listed below is available today.

Please read this section carefully, because it is the most important limitation of the whole service. Tournament, club, event, accommodation and shop information on ChessCentrum is gathered from public sources and from organisers. It is copied and structured by us, it is not maintained by the organisers themselves, and it can be incomplete, outdated or simply wrong.

The organiser's own announcement always wins. Before you travel, pay an entry fee to an organiser, or count on a date, a starting time, a rating restriction, an entry fee or an address, check it on the organiser's own website or ask the organiser directly. The same goes for club evenings, event schedules and accommodation details.

Prices shown on the shop pages are a snapshot of a vendor's page at the moment we recorded it. They are not an offer, they are not binding on anyone, and they may have changed. ChessCentrum sells nothing, takes no payment and is not a party to anything you buy: the sale is between you and the vendor, on the vendor's own terms.

No paid transaction can be made on ChessCentrum. There is no checkout, no basket, no ticketing and no way to pay us or anyone else through this website. We do not ask for and cannot receive card details, IBANs or any other payment information, and no such information is stored anywhere in the service.

Buying a product means following the link to the vendor's own shop and completing the purchase there, under that vendor's terms and prices. Entering a tournament or event means registering with the organiser in the way the organiser describes; the contract is between you and the organiser, and ChessCentrum is not involved in it, not liable for it, and cannot cancel or refund it. The one exception is the free-registration and RSVP feature on ChessCentrum itself: where an event is free to enter, you can record a registration or RSVP on your account, and we then store a row linking your account to that event, as described in the privacy policy. No money is ever involved, and that stored note is our only part in it — taking part remains a matter between you and the organiser.

Offering or looking for a ride on the carpool page does not create a booking or a contract. Nothing you type into that form is stored, and no ride is matched or confirmed by us.

You can use most of ChessCentrum without an account. An account only unlocks the personal features: the dashboard, the linked platform views and the score-sheet scanner.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you think someone else has access to it, change your password through the reset link and tell us at contact@chesscentrum.com.

From your account page you can link a Lichess account, a Chess.com username, a KNSB relation number or a FIDE ID. Each link is a separate, voluntary choice, and each one can be undone on the same page.

Linking means that we fetch the publicly available information belonging to that identity and show it back to you on your own dashboard: your profile, your ratings, your recent games and, for a federation link, your federation profile. We show public fields only. We never display or store an email address or date of birth taken from a federation record.

The data comes from those platforms and federations, not from us. We cannot correct it, we cannot guarantee that it is right or up to date, and we cannot promise that those services stay available or keep their interfaces unchanged. Corrections belong with the platform or federation concerned.

The score-sheet scanner is meant for your own games. You point your camera at a paper score sheet, the transcription is read and checked on your own device, and you correct anything the reading got wrong until the game replays legally.

By default the photo itself never leaves your browser: recognition and any engine analysis run on your device, and nothing is uploaded to us. Where the scanner offers a cloud reading and you explicitly choose it for a photo, that photo is processed transiently by the recognition provider named in the privacy policy and is not stored; the choice is made per photo and is never the default. If you choose to save a finished game, the text of your transcription is sent to our server, checked again there, and stored as a game record.

A saved game is stored deliberately sparsely: the moves, the result, which colour you played, and an optional event name, round and date. No player names and no ratings are stored, not yours and not your opponent's. You keep whatever rights you have in your own game record; the only permission you give us is the practical one we need to store it, show it back to you and include it in your personal statistics. We do not publish it, sell it or share it with anyone.

You can save up to 200 games per account. You can delete any single game from the scanner page, and deleting your account deletes all of them. Do not scan or upload material that is not yours to use, and do not use the scanner to store anything other than chess games.

ChessCentrum is a small, free service with limited capacity. The rules below exist so that it stays available and pleasant for everyone. Breaking them is a ground for suspension or termination under section 18.

If you believe something on ChessCentrum is unlawful, infringes your rights, or is factually wrong about you, your club or your tournament, write to contact@chesscentrum.com. Tell us the exact page, what the problem is and, where relevant, why you are entitled to ask for a change. We confirm receipt, assess the report, and tell you what we decided and why. If we take content down we say so; if we do not, we explain the reason and you are free to take the matter further.

Security weaknesses have their own route. Please report them through our security disclosure page rather than by testing them out on live accounts, and follow the rules described there. That page also states what we promise a reporter in return, including that we will not take legal action against someone who stays within it.

ChessCentrum links to and relies on services run by other people: organiser and club websites, chess shops, Lichess, Chess.com, the KNSB, FIDE, and the map component supplied by Google. We do not control them, we cannot guarantee that they are available, accurate or safe, and we are not responsible for their content or for what happens once you leave our site.

When you follow a link, or when a page loads a third-party component, you are subject to that party's own terms and privacy statement. The privacy policy explains exactly which third parties can see something about your visit and when, and how you can avoid the ones that are not strictly necessary.

The design, the texts, the translations, the structure of the site, the ChessCentrum name and the ChessCentrum logo belong to us. You may read, print and share pages for your own personal, non-commercial use, and you may link to any page. Copying substantial parts of the site, reusing the compiled listings, or using our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you all need our written permission first.

Facts stay facts. Chess moves and results, tournament dates and locations, club addresses, and public federation and rating data are not owned by us, and nothing here is meant to claim them. What we ask you not to take is our selection, structuring, translation and presentation of that material as a whole.

ChessCentrum runs on open-source software that other people wrote, and we ship their licences and attributions with the code. The components listed below carry their own terms, which prevail over these terms for those components.

ChessCentrum is free, and it comes with no uptime guarantee. We do our best to keep it running, but it can be unavailable because of maintenance, a fault, a problem at our hosting provider or database provider, or something outside our control entirely.

We may change, move, restrict or remove features, and we may take the site offline for maintenance, without notice where the change is minor. If we plan to discontinue something you actually depend on, such as saved games or account features, we will announce it on the site in advance and give you a reasonable period to export what you want to keep.

We may also apply reasonable technical limits, such as rate limits or a cap on how many games one account can save, to keep the service healthy.

We provide ChessCentrum as it is. Beyond what the law requires of us, we do not promise that the site will be uninterrupted or error-free, that every listing is accurate, that the search finds everything, that a scanned game is transcribed perfectly, or that an engine evaluation reflects the objective truth of a position. These are aids, and the responsibility for acting on them stays with you.

What we cannot and do not exclude are the guarantees that Dutch consumer law attaches to digital content and digital services. If what we deliver does not conform to what a consumer may reasonably expect of it, you keep your statutory rights, and nothing in these terms limits them.

Nor does anything here limit your rights under data protection law. The privacy policy governs everything that concerns your personal data, and where it and these terms appear to differ, the privacy policy prevails on data matters.

To the extent permitted by law, ChessCentrum is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profit or lost data, or for loss arising from information on the site being incomplete, outdated or wrong, from a third-party service being unavailable or inaccurate, or from a tournament, purchase, stay or ride that you arranged with someone else. Travelling to an event whose details we listed incorrectly is exactly the kind of loss that section 4 asks you to prevent by checking with the organiser.

Because the service is free, any liability that we do bear is limited to what is reasonable in the circumstances. The following, however, is never excluded or limited.

If you break these terms and that causes a third party to make a claim against us, for example because you uploaded material you had no right to use or impersonated someone, we may recover from you the loss and the reasonable costs that we actually incur as a result. This applies only to the extent that the claim is genuinely attributable to your own conduct, and it never goes further than Dutch law allows against a consumer.

This section is included for completeness. Paid services are not currently offered, and section 5 describes the situation today: nothing can be paid for on ChessCentrum.

If that ever changes, we will publish the total price including VAT, the currency, the accepted payment methods, when the amount is charged and under what conditions it is refunded, before you can commit to anything. We will also tell you at that moment about your right of withdrawal: as a consumer buying at a distance, you would in principle have fourteen days to withdraw without giving a reason, and you would be given a model withdrawal form.

You would also be told where that right does not apply, because the law provides exceptions that are directly relevant to a chess site.

You may stop using ChessCentrum at any time, and you may delete your account yourself from the account page whenever you want, without giving a reason. Deleting the account removes your sessions, your linked platform and federation links, your event registrations, and your saved games. Because our database provider keeps daily backups for a short period, an erased record can survive in those backups for up to seven days before it disappears there too.

We may suspend or close an account, or block access to the service, on the grounds below. We give notice and, where the situation allows it, a chance to put things right first; only where waiting would cause real harm do we act immediately and explain afterwards.

If we close your account we delete the associated personal data in the same way as a self-service deletion, unless we are required to keep something longer.

We may change these terms, for example when a feature is added, when a provider changes, or when the law requires it. The current version always carries a date at the top of this page.

For a minor or clarifying change, publishing the new version here is enough. For a change that materially affects your rights or obligations, we announce it on the site and, if you have an account with a working email address, by email at least thirty days before it takes effect.

If you do not accept a material change, you may end your use of ChessCentrum before it takes effect by deleting your account. Continuing to use the service after the effective date means you accept the new version.

If something goes wrong, please tell us first at contact@chesscentrum.com. Describe the problem, the page or account concerned, and what you would like us to do. We confirm receipt within five working days and aim to give a substantive answer within thirty days; if we need longer, we say so and tell you when to expect one.

ChessCentrum is not currently affiliated with a recognised alternative dispute resolution body. If we join one, we will name it here. Consumers in the Netherlands can seek free guidance from ACM ConsuWijzer, and consumers elsewhere in the European Union can approach the European Consumer Centre in their own country for cross-border help. The European Commission's online dispute resolution platform closed on 20 July 2025 and is therefore no longer a route.

Complaints about how we handle personal data have their own route, set out in the privacy policy, including the right to lodge a complaint with the Dutch Data Protection Authority or with the supervisory authority in your own country.

Dutch law applies to these terms and to your use of ChessCentrum. If you are a consumer living in Belgium, Germany, France or another country, this choice of law does not take away the mandatory consumer protection that the law of your own country of residence gives you.

Disputes may be brought before the competent court in the Netherlands. As a consumer, you may also bring a claim before the court where you live, and we may only sue you in the courts of your own country of residence. We would much rather settle a disagreement by email first.

How we handle personal data, which cookies the site uses, which processors are involved and where they are located, how long anything is kept, and how you exercise your rights, are all set out in the privacy and cookie policy. That document governs personal data and prevails over these terms wherever the two touch the same subject.

How to report a security weakness responsibly, what is in and out of scope, how quickly we respond and what we promise a reporter in return, are set out on the security disclosure page. Both pages are available in all the languages of the site, and both are linked from the footer of every page.

A few standard points close these terms out.