Last updated 24 September 2026
There is one thing in Spadecraft you can type that other people read: the name you choose for a rated table. This page is what that name may be, what gets one taken down, and what happens to the account it belonged to. The short answer to the last one is nothing — the name goes and you keep everything you earned.
Not a limitation we are apologising for: it is the design. At a table you can send one of four fixed phrases, written by us, and there is no keyboard. Nobody can type anything at you mid-hand, so there is nothing to mute and nothing to read that somebody meant badly.
It also means that when you report a name, the name is genuinely the whole of what there is to report. There is no context to reconstruct and no log of messages to go through.
Only Latin letters, which we know excludes names that are not written in them. The reason is that letters from two alphabets that look identical are the cheapest way there is to impersonate somebody, and we would rather say so here than quietly ship a rule nobody can see. It is the part of this page most likely to change.
It matches a short list of strings against your name with the spacing and the number-for-letter substitutions taken out, which catches the obvious attempts and a fair few innocent names along with them. If a perfectly ordinary name is refused, that is the filter being blunt rather than an accusation, and the fix is to try another one — or to tell us, because the list of known false positives is maintained by hand and yours may be missing.
We keep the list short on purpose. A list long enough to catch everything is a list long enough to refuse a name somebody was born with, and reports are what catch the rest.
At a rated table, the flag in the top bar lists the other people at it. Tap Report name beside one and the name is sent to us as it read at that moment, so changing it afterwards does not make a report unreadable. Reporting the same name twice in one game counts once.
A person reads every report. Nothing is taken down because a number of reports arrived: three friends at one table could otherwise rename anybody they sat with. We either take the name down, as below, or leave it, and either way the report is closed.
You can report somebody who has already left the table. Their chair is theirs for the whole game, and so is the name it was shown under.
The same flag has Block. Once you block somebody, the queue never seats the two of you at the same rated table again, whichever of you joins first. They are not told.
A block does not remove anybody from the game you are both in — that would be a way to throw out an opponent who was winning — and there is no chat for it to mute, because there is no chat. You can lift a block from Settings, under your name.
The name is removed and nothing else is. Your level, your form, your record against the field, your lessons and drills, your hand records and anything you have paid for are untouched. We do not take a rating away over a name: the name was the problem, and a rating is fifty games of your own play.
We do not pick a new name for you either. The old one is cleared, you choose again the next time you open the app, and the once-a-week limit below does not apply to that one.
A player who keeps doing it is a different matter, and the answer there is being barred from rated play rather than losing a rating. It is rare, it is a decision a person makes, and it is not something the name filter can do on its own.
Once a week. Fixing the capitals on your own name does not count and can be done any time.
The limit is there because a name that can change hourly is a way to walk away from a report before anybody reads it. We keep a record of the names an account has used and when they changed — that is what a report is checked against — and it is deleted along with everything else if you delete your account.
A name you type when joining a private table with people you already know is not a handle. Nothing reserves it, nothing is filtered, and nothing keeps it once that table ends. That is deliberate: private tables need no account at all, and we did not want a game with four friends in it to drag the whole of this page along behind it.
A name that should not have been refused, a name that should not have been allowed, or a decision you think is wrong: support@spadecraft.app. A real person reads it, and you will get an answer about your case rather than a link back to this page.