Terms of Service

1. The agreement

These terms are between you and [PLACEHOLDER — legal entity name, owner to confirm] ("we", "us"), the operator of CountLab. By using the site or the trainer, you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use CountLab.

You do not need an account to use the free trainer, and you do not need one to be bound by these terms — using the site is enough.

2. What CountLab is

CountLab is educational software for practising blackjack basic strategy, card counting, and related decisions. It is a simulator and a drill tool.

CountLab is not a gambling product:

• You cannot bet real money on CountLab.
• You cannot deposit, withdraw, or cash out anything.
• There are no prizes, no jackpots, no tokens with resale value, and no sweepstakes.
• Bankroll figures inside the trainer are abstract units, not currency.
• We are not a casino, we do not operate games of chance for money, and we take no commission, referral fee, or affiliate revenue from anyone who does.

Nothing here is financial advice, investment advice, or a recommendation to gamble.

3. No guarantee of winnings

This section matters more than the rest, so it is written plainly.

• We do not guarantee that you will win money. Not with our training, not with a perfect score, not ever.
• Card counting does not guarantee profit. A skilled counter's theoretical edge is small — on the order of a fraction of a percent per hand — and it is fragile. Common rule variations, poor deck penetration, continuous shuffling machines, and ordinary execution errors can erase it entirely. Many modern games cannot be beaten at all.
• Blackjack carries real financial risk. Even a player with a genuine mathematical edge will have long losing stretches, and a player without one should expect to lose money over time. You can lose everything you gamble.
• A score in CountLab is a measure of your practice, not a prediction of results. Passing a drill, a mastery gate, or a certification inside the product means you performed well in the product. It says nothing about any particular session at any particular table.

If you gamble, gamble only what you can afford to lose. If gambling is causing you harm, help is available — in the US, call or text 1-800-GAMBLER; elsewhere, contact your national problem-gambling service.

4. Your responsibilities

What you do away from the trainer is yours to answer for.

• Local law is your responsibility. Gambling law differs by country, state, and city. You must check what applies where you are before you gamble, and you must not use anything you learn here to break the law.
• Casino rules are your responsibility. A casino's house rules, its conditions of entry, and its terms of membership apply to you regardless of what we say.
• On being barred: counting cards in your head is not a criminal offence in the jurisdictions where this product is likely to be used — it is thinking. But casinos are private businesses, and in most jurisdictions they may refuse service, change your table conditions, or ask you to leave, at their discretion. That is a private-property and contract matter, not a criminal one. Being barred is a normal outcome for a successful advantage player, and it is not something we can prevent, appeal, or compensate you for.
• Devices you use are your responsibility. Using any device, tool, or assistance at a live table — including this site on a phone — may be illegal in your jurisdiction and is very likely prohibited by the casino. CountLab is designed to be practised with, not played with. Do not use it at a table.

5. Age

CountLab is for adults. You must be at least 18 to use it, and at least 21 if that is the legal gambling age where you live. Do not use CountLab if you are under those ages. We do not knowingly provide the service to anyone under 18.

6. Accounts

Accounts are optional. The trainer runs entirely in your browser and stores your progress on your own device. You can use it without ever giving us an email address.

An optional account exists for one purpose: syncing your progress between your own devices. If you create one, you agree to:

• Give an email address you control, and keep your password to yourself.
• Accept responsibility for activity under your account.
• Not share, sell, or transfer the account.

We may suspend or close an account that is being used to break these terms, to attack the service, or in a way that puts other users at risk. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to export your data first.

7. Free and paid plans

The basic-strategy trainer is free and does not require an account or a card. Some features may require a paid subscription. Current plans and prices are shown on the CountLab home page — prices are not restated here, so that this document cannot go stale and contradict them.

Where a paid subscription is offered:

• You see the price and the billing period before you pay. No hidden charges, no fees introduced after checkout.
• Renewal is not a surprise. If a subscription renews automatically, we say so clearly at purchase, and we email you before an annual renewal is charged. You can turn renewal off at any time from your account.
• Cancel any time. Cancelling stops the next charge. You keep paid access until the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not charge a cancellation fee.
• Refunds. If the product does not work as described, tell us and we will put it right or refund you. Beyond that we generally do not refund time you have already had access to. Whatever your local consumer law entitles you to — including any statutory cooling-off period — you keep; nothing in these terms reduces it.
• Price changes. We may change prices for future billing periods. Existing subscribers are told in advance and can cancel before the new price applies. Where we have promised a rate is locked for the life of a subscription, that promise is kept for as long as the subscription stays active.
• What we never sell. We take no money from casinos, operators, or affiliates, and we do not sell your data. Subscriptions are the only thing we sell.

8. Acceptable use

Use CountLab to learn. Do not:

• Scrape, bulk-download, or systematically extract the computed strategy tables, EV values, drill content, or curriculum — whether by script, automation, or manual repetition — in order to republish, redistribute, or resell them, or to build a competing product from them.
• Resell, sublicense, or rent access to CountLab, or share a paid account with people who have not paid.
• Reverse-engineer the service except to the extent that applicable law says you may.
• Attack the service: no attempts to break authentication, overload the API, probe for vulnerabilities without permission, or interfere with other users' data.
• Upload or transmit anything unlawful or malicious through any part of the service.

Exporting your own practice data is not scraping. It is a feature, and it is described in the Privacy Policy.

9. Intellectual property

CountLab — the software, the interface, the curriculum, the drills, the written content, the name and the branding — belongs to us or our licensors.

The strategy computations are ours. The underlying mathematics of blackjack is nobody's property, and we would not claim it. What is ours is our implementation: the solver, the generated strategy tables for each rule set, the EV costs attached to each decision, the skill model, and the way it is all organised and presented. You get a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use them for your own training. You do not get the right to redistribute them.

Third-party components we use are covered by their own licences.

10. Your data

Your practice data is yours. By default it stays on your device and we never see it. You can export it at any time as CSV or JSON from inside the app. If you create an account, you give us permission to store and sync the specific fields listed in the Privacy Policy — only so we can provide the sync feature, for no other purpose.

11. Availability and changes

We aim to keep CountLab working, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. The trainer is built to keep working offline once it has loaded, which limits the damage an outage can do, but sync and account features need our servers and those can go down.

We may add, change, or remove features. If we remove something significant, or shut the service down, we will give reasonable notice and a way to export your data.

12. Ending your use

You can stop using CountLab whenever you like. If you have an account, you can delete it; deleting it removes the synced copy of your data from our server. Data held only on your own device is deleted by you, from your browser — see the Privacy Policy for how.

We can end your access if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms. If we do, the sections that should survive — intellectual property, liability, and governing law — continue to apply.

13. Liability

CountLab is provided as it is. We work hard on correctness — strategy is computed rather than copied, and checked against published authorities and our own simulations — but we do not warrant that the service is error-free, that it will suit your purpose, or that it will always be available.

To the extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for gambling losses. Not for money you lose at a table, not for money you would have won, not for a decision you made because of something you practised here.
• We are not liable for lost profits, lost opportunities, or indirect or consequential loss.
• We are not liable for the loss of data held only on your device — that copy is under your control, and exporting a backup is up to you.
• Where we are liable, our total liability to you is limited to the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim. If you have paid us nothing, this service was free, and our liability is limited accordingly.

None of this excludes liability that cannot legally be excluded — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else your local consumer law protects. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The "last updated" date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects your rights, we will give notice on the site — and by email if you have an account — before it takes effect. Continuing to use CountLab after that means you accept the new terms.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of [PLACEHOLDER — jurisdiction, owner to confirm], and disputes are subject to the courts of [PLACEHOLDER — jurisdiction, owner to confirm]. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms: [PLACEHOLDER — support email, owner to confirm].

See also the Privacy Policy.