Questions & Answers

What happens when my subscription expires?

If you had an old prepaid subscription, you’ll lose access to SparkChess Premium Live upon expiration and you need to purchase a new one.

The new recurring subscriptions are more convenient – they are renewed automatically each month/year as long as you don’t cancel.

What personal information do you collect?

As an EU-registered company, we take privacy very seriously.

We collect just enough information to provide the service to you. We need to collect your IP address. Email addresses are optional. When purchasing a subscription, we may also collect some device information for fraud prevention. And that’s it.

How do I report a player, username, avatar, or chat message?

You can report an abusive chat message directly from the chat. Just hover the mouse over the message and click on “Report abuse”.

To report offensive usernames or avatars, as well as to report abusive players in general (e.g. if you suspect cheating) please contact us with their name.

If you suspect cheating or other abusive behaviour, indicate your username in addition to their and the date when the game took place. We’ll investigate.

How do I block or unblock another player?

After a game is over, you can block your presumably abusive opponent from ever challenging you again (you can also report them!). You can unblock players from your multiplayer account settings (click the Blocked players button).

What are the Premium Live subscription statuses and what do they mean?

When you create a SparkChess Premium Live subscription, you can manage it from your Premium Live account.

On each subscription you can see its status badge, which can be one of the following:

Active – congratulations, your subscription is paid until its next due date and you can freely access SparkChess services.

Canceled – you’ve canceled this subscription. You should see a “Resubscribe” button, should you want to reactivate it.

Past Due – the payment failed on due date. Our payment processor is retrying the payment, but this state usually indicates an issue with your card – maybe it’s expired, or there are insufficient funds available on it (for debit cards).

Pending – this is what may be confusing people. This status indicates that the subscription is schedule to come in effect at a later date. This can happen if you create a subscription while another one is still in effect. For example, on May 1st, you create a monthy subscription. One week in, you decide you prefer an annual subscription because it’s actually significantly less expensive. So you cancel the monthly subscription and create an annual one. But the canceled monthly subscription is still good for another three weeks, until May 31st, so the new annual subscription won’t kick in until May 31st and will remain in Pending state until then.

I can’t log in to Premium Live. What should I check?

There are several issues that might prevent a successful login.

Most frequently, this is due to an incorrect username or password. Start by asking for a password reset via the “Forgotten password?” link on the login screen. Enter your email and send. If you don’t receive an email with the password reset link in a few minutes, the email address is wrong. Contact us if you don’t remember the correct email. We’ve encountered cases with mistyped emails during purchase. If you do receive the email, change the password and try to log in again with the new one.

Very rarely, if after login you see a blank screen and possibly an error message at the top, i.e. “Your account is not properly set up”, it means that there was an error during the purchase that left your account in an inconsistent state – you need to contact us.

How do I reset or recover my Premium Live password?

To change your Premium Live account password, first log in to Premium Live and then click/tap on the downward arrow button at the top of the screen to open the Control Panel. From the control panel, click on the Password button. A window will pop up. Fill in the fields: first the existing password and then the new one, repeating it in the next field, for verification. Click/tap on Change Password button and you’re done!

To reset your Premium Live account password if you forgot it, on the login screen simply click on the “Forgotten password?” link and enter the email address of your account. You will receive an email with a password reset link. Click on it and a page will open in the browser, allowing you to enter and confirm the new email without having to provide the old one.

Is there more than one subscription type?

We introduced SparkChess Premium Live prepaid subscription in 2014 as a result to changes in Chrome Web Store. Users could purchase one-month, six-month, and one-year subscriptions. At the end of the period, users had to manually renew.

The system worked as an alternative to the download options for Windows and Mac.

As time passed, more and more users opted for the online service.

In 2025, we introduced a more streamlined subscription, that works the way virtually all subscriptions work – paid monthly or annually until canceled.

The old prepaid subscription remains available as fallback and for specific cases, such as promotions. If, for any reason, you’d prefer a prepaid subscription, please contact us. We’ll do our best to help.