AcePoker Terms of Service
DRAFT — not yet reviewed by counsel. Written 2026-09-03 to close legal item L-05 (no terms exist); updated 2026-09-04: Route E markers struck after PR #515. Every section marked [counsel] needs a lawyer's eye before this is linked from the site. Every statement marked [not yet built] describes a rule that has been decided but is not yet implemented in the product; it must be built or struck before publication. Until this document is linked, it binds nobody.
Effective date: to be set when published.
1. What AcePoker is
AcePoker (acepoker.io, and the Agent Arena at arena.acepoker.io) is a play-money poker site. There is no redeemable currency on acepoker.io, and no cash or material prizes. Gold Coins have no cash value and can never be redeemed, sold, transferred, or exchanged for anything of value, and are not a prize. Every tournament awards Gold Coins only. Nothing on AcePoker pays out money.
AcePoker operates automated house players ("bots") at many tables, including tables with real players. They are run by AcePoker, play with the same information as every other player (they never see hidden cards), and hold play-money only. [counsel: L-18 disclosure wording]
If a feature offers a purchase or a subscription, the terms for it are in section 6.
2. Your account
- You must be 18 or older to create an account, and old enough to play poker for play-money where you live. [counsel: minimum age by jurisdiction; today the site collects no age at signup]
- One person, one account. You may not share an account or let anyone else use yours.
- You are responsible for keeping your password private. We may verify your email address before you can play.
- We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms (section 5).
- You may delete your account yourself, at any time, from Settings in the app or on the website, or at acepoker.io/account/delete without installing anything. Deleting it removes your identifying details, signs you out everywhere, cancels an active membership, voids any tournament ticket, and forfeits your Gold Coin balance and any club coin you hold, which cannot be recovered afterwards. Gold Coins have no cash value, so nothing that could ever have been redeemed is lost. Records of the hands you played are kept, without your name, because they are also the other players' history — see the Privacy Policy, section 6, and section 7 below. The deletion is refused, and says which it is, while something is unsettled: you are sitting at a table, registered in a running tournament, waiting on a refund, waiting on a payment to be reviewed, or the owner of a club. Each of those clears, and then the deletion goes through.
3. Playing fairly
You agree not to:
- use software to play on your behalf at any human table (bots are welcome only in the Agent Arena, section 4);
- share hole cards, coordinate play, soft-play, chip-dump, or otherwise act together with another player against the rest of the table;
- exploit a bug rather than report it;
- harass other players in chat;
- do anything that interferes with the game server or other players' connections.
Play-money that is won or moved through any of the above may be removed, and the hands may be struck from any record or ranking.
Clubs and club coin
Each club has its own club coin, which its host may rename. Club coin is play-money that exists only inside its club.
- Club coin cannot be bought, sold, cashed out, or exchanged — not for money, not for Gold Coins, and not for coin in another club. Members cannot send it to each other. It can be used only inside its club: in the club's games and on rewards its host offers in the app. It comes only from the club's published rules (the join stake, the daily coin, the refill, a new season), from playing the club's games, and from a host's grant, which the member receiving it can see in their club ledger and which is limited per member per day.
- Buying or selling club coin, or settling club play anywhere off AcePoker — for money, goods, or anything else — is forbidden. When we find it, the club is closed and the accounts involved are actioned under section 5. Report it from a player's profile with the reason "Selling club coin or off-site payment".
- Club rewards happen inside AcePoker. A host may offer rewards that members request with club coin, such as choosing a game's format. A reward is never money, goods, Gold Coins, or anything outside AcePoker, and AcePoker does not provide or guarantee it. Coin spent on a reward is removed from the game, not paid to the host. If the host declines or doesn't answer within 7 days, the coin comes back. Offering an off-site reward is treated like selling club coin.
- Hosts are never paid for their club's play: no share of it, and no coin, Gold Coins, or money from it. AcePoker may give a host membership time as a promotion (for example for founding a club or growing it with active verified members); that is never based on coin, games played, or how much a club plays.
4. The Agent Arena
The Agent Arena is a competition for computer programs ("agents") written and run by you ("the operator"). It runs on its own server and database, separate from the main site. Arena chips are Gold Coins held by an arena-only account that cannot log in to the main site, cannot be redeemed, and holds nothing of value.
Registering and running an agent
- An operator is a verified AcePoker account. An operator may register up to five agents, and each agent may hold up to five live API keys.
- A key is shown once. You are responsible for anything done with it. You may revoke a key at any time and the revocation is immediate.
- The protocol, rate limits, and table rules are published in the arena documentation, which forms part of these terms for arena play.
Fair play between agents
- Agents owned by the same operator may enter the same season. Today the arena will not seat two agents of one operator at the same table or in the same mirror match; that rule may be relaxed. [decision pending: Alex has asked for same-owner agents to be allowed at one table; the live rule still refuses it] No agent may help or benefit another agent in any way outside the normal rules of poker, whether or not they share an owner. Sharing hole cards, coordinating actions, soft-playing, chip-dumping, and signalling between agents are collusion.
- AcePoker records every hand dealt in the arena, and records for each agent connection the API key used, the network address, the client software identifier, and the connection time. This is used to review fair play. [counsel: GDPR basis and retention statement — see section 7]
- Findings of collusion are handled under section 5. A finding applies to the operator, and all of that operator's agents.
What AcePoker may do with arena play
- Hand histories and game records from the arena, including those of your agents, may be used by AcePoker to improve its own bots, its products, and the arena itself. You keep all rights to your agent's code; AcePoker never receives it.
- Results, rankings, and the operator display name you choose are public.
Prizes
- The arena does not charge an entry fee and does not pay cash prizes from entry fees. If a sponsored prize is ever offered, it is awarded to the agent's author for skill in programming, eligibility is free, and the sponsor's own rules apply. [counsel: L-24]
5. Suspension, strikes, and appeal
Breaches of section 3 or section 4 are handled on a ladder, applied to the account (or, in the arena, the operator):
| Finding | First | Second | Third | Fourth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minor (a pattern that could be poor play as easily as cooperation) | Warning | One-week suspension | Season suspension | Ban |
| Major (anything that could only be done by two parties acting together, such as sharing hole cards, chip-dumping, or whipsawing; or bot play at a human table) | Season suspension | Ban |
In every case, the hands and match results named in the finding are struck from any ranking. [not yet built: identifying the affected hands is manual — an admin lists every tainted hand/match id when filing the finding; nothing auto-voids] A suspended operator is shown as "suspended" on any public ranking, without a reason. A banned operator may appeal once, in writing, to the support address in section 9; appeals are read by a person; a second appeal is refused as a matter of policy, not by the system. [not yet built: no appeal counter exists] [not yet built: removal of chips won through the breach — a finding strikes the hands and match results from every ranking, but no chip balance is adjusted on a cash felt; and the ladder tooling exists for arena operators only, so a section 3 breach on the main site is still handled by hand]
AcePoker may also suspend or close an account for behaviour not listed here where that is reasonably necessary to protect other players or the service.
6. Purchases and memberships
[counsel: this whole section. Gold Coin packs and memberships are sold on acepoker.io through Stripe Checkout (L-01, L-03, L-16, L-21, L-31).]
- What you can buy. Gold Coin packs and a Member or VIP membership, on acepoker.io only, paid through Stripe (card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or Link). The AcePoker apps sell nothing. The price is shown before you pay; sales tax is added at checkout where it applies.
- Gold Coins. Gold Coins are play-money: they have no cash value and can never be redeemed, sold, transferred, or exchanged for anything of value. Purchased Gold Coins do not expire. Buying Gold Coins never changes your rank, level or tier.
- Who can buy. You must be 18 or older, and you must tell us your US state of residence before your first purchase. Purchases are not available to residents of Washington State: a Washington state of residence or a Washington billing address is refused, and a purchase that gets through anyway is refunded automatically with nothing credited. [counsel: the WA exclusion is a floor, not a ceiling; the state list is L-16/L-21.]
- Purchase limit. At most 5 Gold Coin checkouts per hour per account.
- All sales final. Every purchase is final. We do not give refunds except where the law requires it or where we choose to in a particular case.
- Memberships renew automatically. A membership is a subscription to site features. It gives no advantage in a hand. It does change what the site gives you outside a hand: a larger daily-login Gold Coin reward, more daily challenges, and eligibility for member-only Gold Coin Races. It renews automatically every month, or every year on annual billing, at the price shown at checkout, until you cancel. Cancel anytime from Settings → Membership → Manage subscription; you keep the features until the end of the period you paid for.
- Refunds and chargebacks remove what they bought. If a purchase is refunded or charged back, we remove the Gold Coins it bought from your balance (as much as your balance still holds), or we end the membership at once. A chargeback also turns off purchases on the account and may close it.
- No redeemable currency and no prizes. AcePoker has no redeemable currency and runs no sweepstakes. Nothing you buy, win, or are given on acepoker.io can be exchanged for cash, goods, or anything of value outside the game. Tournaments award Gold Coins only.
7. Your data
- What we store, why, and who it is shared with is set out in the Privacy Policy at acepoker.io/privacy. In summary: your email, username, password hash, play history, and, if you declare it, your date of birth; and, if you complete identity verification, the documents you upload. [counsel: the Privacy Policy is a draft of the same standing as this document and needs the same review — L-05]
- We use your data to run the game, keep it fair, contact you about your account, and improve the service. We do not sell it.
- Arena connection records (section 4) are kept for the season and 90 days after it, then archived for fair-play review and product improvement. [not yet built: no retention job or archive exists; rows are kept indefinitely until it does]
- You may delete your account yourself (section 2). You may ask for a copy of your data at the support address in section 9. We will comply subject to what we must keep to resolve disputes or meet a legal obligation.
8. The service, warranties, and liability
- AcePoker is provided as is. Play-money balances, rankings, features, and the service itself may change, be reset, or be withdrawn at any time.
- To the fullest extent the law allows, AcePoker is not liable for any loss arising from use of the service. Nothing on the service has cash value, so there is no monetary loss to claim from play.
- [counsel: arbitration clause and class waiver. L-31 records that an arbitration clause is what moved the UT/NJ Playtika classes into arbitration. Decide whether to include one; if so, it is the most important paragraph in this document and must be drafted by counsel, not by this draft.]
- [counsel: governing law and venue.]
9. Contact and changes
Support: [address to set].
We may change these terms. Material changes will be announced on the site at least 14 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that date is acceptance.
Appendix: what this draft does not yet cover
For whoever picks this up, so nothing here is mistaken for complete:
- Bot disclosure — the disclosure is the section 1 paragraph of these Terms. The [counsel: L-18] marker there is about whether that wording is sufficient.
- ~~A separate Privacy Policy~~ — written 2026-09-19 and served at acepoker.io/privacy, as a draft of the same standing as this document. Its own appendix lists what it still does not cover.
- A responsible-play statement, if any regulator or app store asks for one.
- The B4 service agreement for hosted Discord rooms (operator of record, play-money-only, no side-betting, termination, kill switch — L-11, L-22).
- The hosted poker night booking terms (per-head pricing, cancellation, what the host provides — L-23, L-29).
- Whether a Terms checkbox at signup is added; today the signup form asserts nothing.
- Every [not yet built] marker above is a promise the product cannot keep today: identifying the hands affected by a breach (an admin names every tainted hand and match by id; nothing auto-voids), removal of chips won through a breach (the named hands are struck from ranking; no chip balance is adjusted), an appeal counter (a second appeal is refused by policy, not by the system), and connection-record retention. Build each or strike it before this is linked.