1. Who this agreement is with, and why that matters
C4Chess is operated by C4Chess Education Private Limited ("C4Chess", "we", "us"), a private limited company incorporated in India under Corporate Identity Number U85410WB2025PTC280318, with its registered office at 4th Floor FL-4C, 83 S.P. Mukherjee Road, Kalighat, Kolkata - 700026, West Bengal, India. These Terms & Conditions govern access to and use of the C4Chess website, portal, coaching services and connected features.
Most people who learn on C4Chess are children. Under section 11 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, a person under 18 cannot enter into a binding contract, and an agreement made with a minor is void from the outset. We have written these Terms on that footing rather than pretending otherwise.
So: if the learner is under 18, the agreement is between C4Chess and the parent or legal guardian who sets up, consents to, or pays for the account. The child is a permitted user under that agreement, not a party to it. Where these Terms say "you", they mean the adult account holder or consenting guardian, except where the text is plainly addressed to the learner (for example the rules on conduct during classes).
If the learner is 18 or over, the agreement is directly with that person.
We are not asking anyone to sign away rights they cannot sign away. Nothing in these Terms limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, or any other Indian law that does not permit its rights to be excluded by contract. Where a term of these Terms conflicts with such a law, the law wins and the rest of these Terms continue to apply.
2. What C4Chess provides
C4Chess is an online chess coaching academy. Depending on what you enrol in or use, the service may include: live online classes with a coach, an age-graded curriculum and structured lessons, homework assignments and coach feedback, batch scheduling and attendance records, practice against our own chess engine, tactics puzzles, game analysis, opening preparation, progress reports and certificates, a chess news and articles section (ChessDaily), a video library, and a parent view linked to a child's account.
Some features are open to anyone, including visitors who are not signed in and guest users. Coaching, batches, homework and the classroom are available to enrolled students.
We develop the platform continuously. Features may be added, changed, or withdrawn. Where a change materially reduces something you have paid for, section 9 (fees) and section 10 (refunds and consumer rights) apply.
3. What we promise about coaching, and what we do not
We promise to deliver the classes and services you have enrolled in, through coaches we have selected, with reasonable care and skill. That is a real obligation and we take it seriously.
We do not promise results. Chess improvement depends on the student's practice, attendance, aptitude and effort far more than on any curriculum. We make no guarantee of any particular rating gain, tournament result, competition selection, examination outcome, title, ranking, or rate of progress, and nothing said by a coach, in marketing material, in a progress report, or in a demo class should be read as such a guarantee.
Ratings shown inside C4Chess (for play, puzzles and progress) are internal measures used to match opponents and pitch material at the right level. They are not FIDE, AICF or any other official rating, and they do not convert into one.
Analysis produced by our chess engine, by automated review, or by the in-app coaching assistant is a study aid. It can be wrong. It does not replace a coach's judgement.
The service is delivered over the internet and depends on your device, your connection and third-party infrastructure. We aim for continuous availability but do not guarantee it, and we may take the service down for maintenance.
4. Eligibility, and who may hold an account
Registering has two steps. You create the account, and then, before the portal opens to you, we ask a short set of questions: your age band, and a separate acknowledgement of each of these three documents. Both are compulsory. The account exists from the first step, so nothing is lost if you stop partway — you are simply asked again next time you sign in.
Users are hereby requested to read all three documents — these Terms & Conditions, the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy — and not merely to tick the boxes. A user under 18 is advised to seek their parent's or guardian's guidance before proceeding any further.
We ask for an age band — under 13, 13 to 15, 16 or 17, or 18 and over — rather than a date of birth, because a band answers every question we actually have to answer (which terms apply, whether guardian consent is needed, how advertising must be treated) while collecting less personal data about a child. Enrolled students may separately be asked for a real date of birth where an age-group class or a tournament entry requires it. We record the date you declared your band alongside it, so that we can tell when the answer has aged and ask again rather than relying on it forever.
A user of any age may hold an account, including a user under 13. What follows from declaring under 13 is that parental consent is recorded as outstanding, that any advertising you see is non-personalised, and that we ask you to read these three documents with a parent or guardian rather than on your own.
Every account whose declared band is under 18 — under 13 included — is created with parental consent recorded as still outstanding, and a parent or legal guardian must consent to these Terms, to our Privacy Policy, and to the child's use of the service. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, anyone under 18 is a child, and we treat them as one.
Because a band is a declaration and not a proof, we do not treat it as one. Where the declaration is old enough that we can no longer rely on it, we ask again rather than assume; and where a person did not answer at all, they are treated as a child rather than as an adult, because on a platform used mostly by children the absence of an answer is not evidence of adulthood.
You must give accurate information, including about age. If information reaches us suggesting that an account does not meet these requirements — for example that the declared band is untrue, or that a guardian has not in fact agreed to a child's use — we may restrict or suspend the account until it is put right, and we may ask a guardian to confirm consent.
5. Parental and guardian consent, and what a guardian takes on
By consenting to a child's use of C4Chess, a parent or legal guardian confirms that they are the child's parent or legal guardian, that they have read these Terms and the Privacy Policy, that they agree to them on their own behalf and permit the child's use on that basis, and that they consent to our processing of the child's personal data as described in the Privacy Policy.
A guardian remains responsible for supervising the child's use of the platform, for the conduct of the child's account, and for authorising any payment made for or by the child. A child cannot commit a guardian to a purchase.
A guardian may, at any time: review the personal data we hold about their child; ask us to correct or erase it; withdraw consent; ask us to close the child's account. Write to privacy@c4chess.com. Withdrawing consent means we can no longer lawfully provide the service to that child, so it will end the account — we will say so clearly before acting, not afterwards.
We link parent accounts to child accounts only after verifying the link (currently by a one-time code sent to the parent), because a parent view exposes a child's progress, attendance and feedback and must not be granted on an unverified claim.
If you are a child reading this and you do not have a guardian's permission, please stop and ask them first. We would rather you asked.
6. Accounts and account security
You can register with an email address and a password, or through a supported sign-in provider such as Google. If you use a sign-in provider, that provider's own terms and privacy policy also apply to your use of it.
Keep your password confidential and do not share your account. You are responsible for activity that takes place under your account, except to the extent it results from our own failure. Tell us at support@c4chess.com as soon as you think someone else has access.
One person, one account. Accounts may not be sold, transferred or shared, and a class place is personal to the enrolled student.
We may run a small number of accounts for staff, coaches and administration with elevated access. Access to a student's records by staff is limited to what their role requires and is logged.
7. Live online classes
Live classes run in a video classroom inside the platform. Joining a class means your camera and microphone stream to the coach and to other participants in that class while you are connected, and that other participants can see and hear you.
We do not record live classes. There is no recording function in the platform and no stored video or audio of a session. What we do keep from a class is the fact and timing of joining and leaving (for attendance), and any notes or feedback the coach writes afterwards.
Coaches may not record classes on their own devices, and students and guardians may not record, photograph, screenshot for redistribution, or livestream a class or any other participant. Classes contain children. Please treat this rule as absolute.
Behave in a class as you would in a classroom: be on time, be civil, do not disrupt, and follow the coach's instructions. We may remove a participant from a session and, for repeated or serious conduct, restrict or end an account.
Some meetings can be joined by a guest with a link and a code, subject to the host admitting them. Do not share such a link with anyone the host has not invited.
8. Acceptable use and community safety
Because children use this platform, safety is not a section we treat as boilerplate. The following are prohibited without exception: any sexual content or contact involving a minor; grooming or any attempt to move a child to a private channel off the platform; bullying, harassment, threats, or hate speech; sharing or requesting another user's personal details, including a child's contact information, school or address; and impersonating a coach, staff member, parent or another student.
Also prohibited: unlawful activity; sharing content you have no right to share; uploading malware; attempting to breach, probe, overload or circumvent the platform's security or access controls; accessing another person's account or data; and using the service to advertise or recruit.
In games and puzzles, do not use a chess engine, another person, an outside database, or any other assistance where the format does not permit it, and do not deliberately lose, manipulate results, or operate more than one account to affect ratings or standings.
We may moderate, remove content, restrict features, suspend accounts, and preserve and disclose records where it is necessary to protect a child, comply with law, or respond to a lawful request. Conduct that puts a child at risk will be reported to the appropriate authorities and we will not warn the account holder first where doing so would increase the risk.
To report a safety concern, use the reporting tools in the portal or write to support@c4chess.com with the word URGENT in the subject line. Reports about a child's safety are prioritised.
9. Fees, enrolment and payment
Coaching at C4Chess is paid for outside the platform — by bank transfer or another method we agree with you — and confirmed by our team. The platform does not take card payments and has no online checkout. What you do in the platform is upload proof of a payment you have already made, which our staff then verify against our records before enrolment is activated. Proof of payment is stored privately and is visible only to the staff who need it.
Fees, what they cover, and the term they cover are set out at the time of enrolment. Fees are quoted in the currency stated and, where applicable, are inclusive of Goods and Services Tax. We will tell you before a fee changes for a renewal; a change does not apply retrospectively to a term already paid for.
Where the student is a minor, the parent or guardian who consented to the account is the person contracting for and owing the fees.
If a class cannot run on its scheduled date because of something at our end, we will reschedule it or arrange a substitute coach. If a student misses a class, please check the make-up arrangements for your batch — they vary by programme and are set out at enrolment.
10. Cancellation, refunds and your consumer rights
You may stop taking classes at any time. Tell us in writing at support@c4chess.com; the effective date is the date we receive it.
Where a service has not been delivered, or has been delivered deficiently within the meaning of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, you are entitled to a remedy and we will provide one — a replacement class, a credit, or a refund of the undelivered portion, as appropriate. Where we cancel a course or cannot provide it, we refund the undelivered portion.
Fees for classes already delivered are not refundable, and a refund is not available simply because a student did not attend classes that were available to them. Beyond that, we deal with refund requests reasonably and in line with consumer law rather than by rule.
Duplicate payments and payment errors are refunded in full on request. Refunds are made to the source the payment came from.
These are your rights in addition to, not instead of, anything the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 gives you. Nothing here removes your right to complain to a District, State or National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, and nothing here requires you to give up that route.
11. Our content and intellectual property
The curriculum, lessons, exercises, puzzles, opening courses, articles, videos, reports, engine, software, designs, branding and all other material we make available are owned by C4Chess or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright and other law.
While your account is active and your fees are paid, you have a personal, non-transferable, non-commercial licence to access and use that material for your own learning or, if you are a guardian, for the learning of the child on whose behalf you enrolled. Nothing more is granted.
You may not copy, redistribute, publish, sell, sublicense, rent, or share access to our material; use it to teach or run classes for anyone else, whether paid or unpaid; remove or obscure attribution; or use our name or logo without written permission.
Some material on the platform comes from open sources — for example puzzle positions derived from public game databases, and chess piece artwork under open licences. Those parts remain under their own licences and we do not claim ownership of them.
12. Automated access, scraping, and artificial-intelligence training
Our curriculum and our published writing are the substance of the business, and they are the exact kind of material that gets harvested. So this is stated plainly rather than buried.
You may not use any robot, spider, scraper, crawler, headless browser, automated script, or bulk-download or extraction tool to access, copy, index or collect any part of the platform or its content, except that a general-purpose search engine may crawl our public pages in line with our robots file.
You may not use any part of the platform or its content — including the curriculum, lessons, exercises, coach feedback, ChessDaily articles, video material, and any text, images or data generated on or by the platform — to train, fine-tune, evaluate, ground, or otherwise develop any machine-learning or artificial-intelligence model or dataset, whether or not the output is commercial, and whether the use is by a person or by an automated agent acting for them.
You may not resell, republish or make available our content through any interface, product, dataset, feed or model, and you may not circumvent any technical measure limiting access to it.
This section does not restrict anything you are permitted to do by a law that cannot be excluded by contract.
13. Content you provide
You keep ownership of what you submit — homework, messages, feedback, notes, game moves, and any file you upload. You give us a limited licence to store, display, transmit and process it for the purpose of running the service: showing homework to your coach, delivering a message to its recipient, producing a progress report, and so on. That licence lasts as long as we need it for that purpose and ends when the content is deleted.
We do not sell your content, publish it outside the platform, or use it to advertise, and we do not use a student's work or games to train an artificial-intelligence model.
Only submit content you have the right to submit, and do not include other people's personal details in it. Content that breaches section 8 may be removed.
Where a student's game is shown in a public area of the platform — for example in a shared analysis link that you create — that is a choice you make. Games are not published outside the platform by default.
14. Third-party services
The platform runs on services provided by others: hosting and content delivery, the database and authentication layer, the live video infrastructure, email delivery, image assets, an embedded video player, analytics, and — in future — advertising. Which providers these are, and what data reaches them, is set out in the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy.
Where you choose to connect an external account — for example by signing in with Google, or by entering a Chess.com or Lichess username so we can fetch your public games for preparation — you are asking us to interact with that service, and that service's own terms and privacy policy apply to it.
We are responsible for choosing our providers with care and for the contracts we hold with them. We are not responsible for the internal operation of a third-party service outside our control, or for content on a site we link to.
15. Suspension, termination and closing your account
You may close your account at any time. Most account holders can do it themselves, from Settings → Account, without asking us; the Privacy Policy explains exactly what closing it destroys, and which four kinds of account have to come through us instead — staff, an enrolled student mid-enrolment, a child, and an account whose age we cannot place. Otherwise write to support@c4chess.com. Closure ends access to paid services from the effective date; section 10 governs any refund.
We may suspend or terminate an account where these Terms are breached, where the account was created with false information, where fees remain unpaid after notice, where it is necessary to protect a user (particularly a child) or the platform, or where the law requires it.
Except where a child's safety, a legal obligation, or the security of the platform makes it impossible, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond. Suspension for a suspected safety issue may be immediate.
On termination, sections 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18 and 19 survive, together with any accrued payment obligation. What happens to your personal data is set out in the Privacy Policy.
16. Disclaimers
Other than what we expressly promise in these Terms — in particular the promise in section 3 to deliver the classes you enrolled in with reasonable care and skill — the platform is provided as it is and as available.
We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, error-free, or free of harmful components; that any defect will be corrected; that the platform will work on every device or connection; or that automated analysis, ratings, recommendations or generated content will be accurate.
Nothing in this section limits anything that cannot be limited under Indian law, including under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.
17. Limitation of liability
We do NOT exclude or limit our liability for: death or personal injury caused by our negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; gross negligence or wilful misconduct; harm to a child arising from our own failure to take the care we owe; any liability arising under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 that the Act does not permit to be excluded; any liability under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023; or anything else that Indian law does not permit to be excluded or limited. Any provision of these Terms that would have such an effect does not apply to that extent.
Subject to that, and to the extent Indian law permits: we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of opportunity, loss of anticipated savings, loss of goodwill, or for indirect or consequential loss; we are not liable for failure to achieve any chess result, rating, selection or place; and we are not liable for loss caused by your own breach of these Terms, by your device or connection, or by an event outside our reasonable control.
Subject to the carve-outs above, our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with these Terms and your use of the service in any twelve-month period is limited to the total fees you paid to C4Chess in that period, or ten thousand Indian Rupees if no fees were paid.
Each part of this section operates separately. If any part is held unenforceable, the remainder continues to apply.
18. Your responsibility for misuse
If you breach section 8 (acceptable use) or section 12 (automated access and AI training), and a third party brings a claim against us because of it, you are responsible for the reasonable losses, costs and legal fees we incur as a direct result.
This applies only to the account holder or consenting guardian, only to a breach that was deliberate or careless, and only to loss actually caused by that breach. It does not apply to a child, and it does not apply where the claim arises from something we did.
We will tell you promptly about any such claim, will not settle it without consulting you, and will let you take over the defence if you wish to.
19. Governing Law and Jurisdiction
These Terms shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of India. Subject to applicable consumer-protection laws and any mandatory jurisdictional rights available to consumers, the courts at Kolkata, West Bengal, shall have jurisdiction over disputes arising from these Terms.
20. Raising a problem, and grievance redressal
Please raise a problem with us first. Most things are resolved that way, it costs you nothing, and it is faster than any other route.
For any grievance about the service, about content on the platform, or about the handling of personal data, contact our Grievance Officer, Surya Tribedy, at privacy@c4chess.com, or by post at C4Chess Education Private Limited, 4th Floor FL-4C, 83 S.P. Mukherjee Road, Kalighat, Kolkata - 700026, West Bengal, India. For non-privacy matters, support@c4chess.com.
Please include your account email, what happened, when, and what you would like us to do. We will acknowledge your grievance within 48 hours and respond within 30 days, or sooner where the law requires it.
A grievance concerning the safety of a child is escalated immediately and does not wait for that timetable.
If you are a consumer, your statutory right to approach a District, State or National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 — including a Commission where you reside or work — is unaffected, and nothing in these Terms requires you to arbitrate or to give up a class or representative action. Nothing in these Terms restricts any non-waivable right available under applicable consumer law.
Complaints about personal data are handled under the Privacy Policy. Before approaching the Data Protection Board of India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, a Data Principal is required to exhaust the grievance-redressal opportunity provided by C4Chess. That requirement applies to the Board route only; it does not affect the consumer remedies described above, or any other remedy independently available under applicable law.
21. Changes to these Terms, and the record of what you accepted
We may update these Terms. Each version carries a version identifier and a last-updated date. When you accept these Terms, we record which version you accepted and when, so that both of us can tell later exactly what was agreed. You can always read the current version at /legal/terms.
Where a change is material — particularly a change to fees, to what we collect about a child, or to your rights — we will give notice in the portal or by email before it takes effect and, where the law requires it, ask for fresh consent. Continuing to use the service after a non-material change means the updated Terms apply.
If you do not accept a material change, you may close the account, and section 10 governs any refund of a fee for a period not yet delivered.
22. General
These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the service. Nothing in this paragraph limits liability for fraud or misrepresentation.
If a court finds any provision unenforceable, that provision is modified to the minimum extent needed or removed, and the rest continues in force.
Our not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it. You may not assign your rights under these Terms; we may assign ours to a group company or on a transfer of the business, provided your rights are not reduced.
The English version of these documents is the version that governs. Translations shown in the portal are machine-generated reading aids only.
Questions: support@c4chess.com. Privacy and data requests: privacy@c4chess.com.