How to close or delete your Chess.com account

By Otabek Mamadaliev · Sources last reviewed 21 August 2026 · What this means

Your games live in two places. Every game you played is also in your opponent's archive. Chess is a two-player record and you cannot unilaterally erase half of it — even a full deletion request anonymises your games rather than removing them.

Closing and deleting are not the same thing

• Closing makes the account inactive. If you closed it yourself, you can reopen it.
• Deleting is a Right To Be Forgotten request. Chess.com calls it permanent and irreversible, "even by our staff".

Before you do either

• Finish or resign your ongoing games. On closure they are awarded to your opponents — so walking away mid-tournament hands out free wins.
• Delete forum posts, comments and notes by hand if you want them gone. Deletion only anonymises them, and afterwards you cannot sign in to reach them.
• Download your games as PGN, which opens in any chess software.
• Cancel Diamond or Gold separately — see the warning below.

Do not use Close My Account to cancel Premium. Chess.com flags this itself: closing the account closes it entirely. If you only want to stop paying, the membership cancellation option is on the same settings page.

Close your account

On the web:

1. Click the cogwheel in the bottom-left corner, then All Settings.
2. Choose Account from the left menu.
3. Scroll to Close Your Account.
4. Enter your password and confirm with the red button.

On mobile: tap More in the bottom-right, then Settings, then Account, tap the small "Tap Here" text, then Close My Account, enter your password and confirm.

Delete your data instead

1. Go to chess.com/my-data and sign in.
2. Scroll to Right To Be Forgotten.
3. Enter your username and confirm.

On mobile it is under Settings → Account → Remove my data.

You have 10 days, and the escape hatch is simply logging in. The request takes 10 days to process, and signing in during that window cancels it. After 10 days without a login it cannot be undone by anyone, including Chess.com staff.

Game records, comments and public posts are anonymised rather than removed. An account banned for policy violations is anonymised rather than fully deleted.

Close, or delete — they are genuinely different

Chess.com is unusual in offering both, and picking the wrong one is the mistake worth avoiding here.

If you are taking a break, close. If you want Chess.com to stop holding data about you, use the data request — and understand it anonymises the games rather than deleting them, because the other player owns half of every record.

Download your games properly

This is the one genuinely irreplaceable thing on the account, and PGN is a plain-text format that will outlive any platform. Do it before anything else.

• Use the archive download rather than saving games one at a time — a few thousand games is normal for an active account and copying them individually is not realistic.
• Take the whole history, not just recent games. The interesting ones are usually old.
• Open the file in a chess program before you rely on it. A PGN that downloaded incompletely looks like a file until you try to read it.
• Keep your annotations in mind — notes and comments you added may not travel with the moves, so check whether the export includes them.

Your rating history and any analysis you have saved are worth a screenshot at the same time. Neither is in the PGN, and neither survives in a form you can reach once the account is gone.

Cancel the membership at its source

Diamond and Gold can be billed by Chess.com directly, by Apple, or by Google, depending on where you subscribed — and only the biller can stop the billing. Closing the account does not do it for an app-store subscription, which is exactly the situation where you end up paying for a platform you can no longer log into.

Check which one applies by looking at the charge on your statement, cancel there, confirm the end date, and only then close the account.