How we check each listing
Cologne Chess collects the clubs, school groups, meetups, courses and open tournaments of Köln and the region around it. This page names the pages each entry draws on, explains how every fact is marked and dated, and shows where the guide stops.
The area covered
The guide covers Köln, Bonn and Leverkusen and every town of the Rhein-Erft district and the Rhein-Sieg district, each named on its own: from Bedburg, Bergheim, Pulheim and Kerpen to Siegburg, Troisdorf, Hennef, Königswinter, Rheinbach and Wachtberg. Inside Köln and the other towns an entry also names the Stadtteil when a page gives it.
Nothing here is graded or paid for. Each list starts with the entry whose dated trace is the most recent, and places that have closed or moved stay at the end of the full list.
What each entry is built from
Clubs start from schach.in, the club database behind the German Chess Federation’s club finder, which gives each club’s playing venue. Every club site that opened was then read for dated news, and for clubs without a readable site the league portal of the Schachverband Mittelrhein supplied dated fixtures of the current season.
Tournaments come from the FIDE list of rated events and from the Cologne Chess Association’s list of open club tournaments. A tournament a club plays on its own evenings stays on that club’s entry; the large opens have entries of their own. School groups come from the schools’ own pages and from the results of the NRW school chess finals and the Cologne school city championship; libraries, senior networks and neighbourhood centres from the city’s event calendar and their own pages.
Each fact ends in a small number that links to its source, with a short quotation in the language of that page and the day it was read. Where two pages disagree, the entry cites both.
Source marks
Official means the page is published by the club, the school, the venue, the organiser or a chess federation. Secondary means someone else reports it: a tournament list, a league portal, a city calendar or a newspaper. Unverified means the fact rests on posts by users or on one passing mention.
A mark says who is speaking, not whether they are right. A row in the club database shows that a club is registered, not that it met last week, so a club known from the database alone reads as not confirmed.
What stays open
Clubs in the region print league fixtures and club news readily, but seldom fees or whether a guest may simply turn up. School groups are often known only from competition results, and many neighbourhood offers appear for one season of a programme leaflet. Whatever no page states reads “not stated by sources”; an empty field never means no.
Anyone with a page that fills a gap can send it through the form; it is checked, dated and added at the next revision.
What the guide does not judge
- No club, school, course, group or tournament is rated, scored or ranked against another.
- Every entry rests on published pages; no venue is visited for this guide.
- Fees are shown as printed on the day of reading and may have changed since.
- Club evenings and school groups often change with the school year and the new league season.
- Teaching quality is not assessed; a coach’s title is only compared with the FIDE database.
- Step-free access, parking and the state of the rooms are not checked.
- Attendance is not counted, so no entry says how full an evening gets.
- A row in a club register shows that a club exists, not that it meets this week.
Corrections by those listed
Club boards, school staff, organisers, coaches, parents and players can correct any entry through the recommendation form. A link to a page with the right information makes a correction quick to verify.
Every accepted correction is dated in the history of list edits and shown on the entry. A club or person who prefers not to be listed can say so through the same form, and the entry comes off at the next revision.
Reading dates and revisions
The sources of the current entries were all read on , and each source shows its reading date, so the age of every piece of evidence stays visible.
About every 6 months the whole guide is read again. In between, a club may change its room or its evening before the entry follows; the club’s or the organiser’s own page always has the last word.
Who runs it
Cologne Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, schools, venues or organisers, carries no advertising, and has no ties to the German Chess Federation, the Schachverband Mittelrhein or the Cologne Chess Association.
It exists because the region’s chess is scattered across a club database, a league portal, tournament lists, school news and many club and neighbourhood pages, each holding one piece. The form lets players and clubs keep it accurate between revisions.
Using the data
The whole guide is available as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with all sources, marks and dates. It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, so it may be reused freely as long as Cologne Chess is credited.
A plain-text summary for language models and other software is at llms.txt.
Considered and left out
Candidates considered and not listed: 28. Most are map points or venues with no dated chess on any page, club tournaments kept on their club’s entry, or clubs outside Köln, Bonn, Leverkusen and the Rhein-Erft and Rhein-Sieg districts.
Map positions
An entry has a map position only when its address was matched to a building in the OpenStreetMap address search or a source page gives one; such positions are marked as approximate. An entry with an address but no position offers a button that looks the address up on a map.
No position is set by hand, and the site draws no map of its own. Map data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database Licence.