How the list is sourced
Chess in Berlin gathers the chess clubs, tournaments, youth and school chess and the few other chess places of Berlin and the towns around it. This page explains which pages an entry is built from, how each fact is marked and dated, and what the list leaves out.
What the list covers
The area is the city of Berlin and the towns on its edge: Potsdam, Falkensee, Kleinmachnow, Teltow, Stahnsdorf, Hennigsdorf, Oranienburg, Bernau bei Berlin, Hoppegarten, Erkner, Schönefeld, Blankenfelde-Mahlow, Ludwigsfelde and Königs Wusterhausen. An entry inside the city shows its district where a source names one; an entry from one of the towns shows the town.
No entry is scored, rated or paid for, and none is lifted above another. Each list starts with the entries whose newest dated trace is the most recent; closed or moved places stay at the end of the complete list.
Where the facts come from
The Berliner Schachverband publishes a register of its clubs with the playing place and the club evening of each, and a calendar and news page that date the league rounds, the championships and many club events. Those pages start most club entries.
Tournaments are read on the chess-results server, where Berlin organisers post their pairings and results, and on the clubs' own news pages, which also give the youth hours, the rooms and the newest dated report. The school chess site of the federation, a ticket page and a shop's site fill in the rest.
Every fact in an entry carries a small number that leads to its source: the page, a short quotation in the page's own language and the day it was read. Where two pages disagree, for example on the room of a club evening, the entry keeps both and says which page says what.
Marks on the sources
A source is official when it comes from the club or venue itself, from an organiser or from a chess federation; secondary when a third party reports it, such as the tournament server or a ticket page; unverified when it rests on users' posts or a single passing mention.
The mark tells who is speaking, not whether they are right. A register line shows that a club exists and where it says it plays; the newest dated trace, such as a league report or a tournament page, shows that the chess is still going on.
What stays open
Berlin clubs seldom print their fees, and few say outright whether a visitor can just drop in. Where no page gives an answer, the entry reads “not stated by sources”; an empty line never means no.
Anyone who knows a page that closes a gap can send it through the form. It is checked and added with its date at the next revision.
What the list does not judge
- No club, tournament, school or coach is graded, scored or ranked.
- Entries rest on published pages; nobody visits the rooms for this list.
- Fees and entry prices are copied as printed on the day of reading and may have changed since.
- Club evenings follow the season and the Berlin school holidays and can change before an entry does.
- The quality of training is not assessed; a coach's title is only compared with the FIDE record.
- Steps, lifts, parking and other practical matters of a room are not checked.
- Attendance is not counted, so no entry can say how many players come.
- A line in the federation register proves membership, not that the boards are set up tonight.
If an entry is about you
Club officials, organisers, coaches, parents and players can correct an entry through the form. A link to a page with the right information makes the change quick.
Every accepted correction is dated in the list updates and noted on the entry concerned. A club or person who prefers not to be listed can say so through the same form, and the entry is taken down at the next revision.
Dates and revisions
The pages behind the entries now listed were read between and . The date beside each source shows how old that piece of evidence is.
The whole list is read again about every 6 months. In between, a club may change its room or its evening before the entry catches up; the club's own page has the last word.
Who runs it
Chess in Berlin is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organisers, schools or venues, carries no advertising for them and has no tie to the Berliner Schachverband or any other chess federation.
It exists because Berlin chess is scattered over a federation register, a tournament server and dozens of club websites, each holding one piece of the picture. The form lets players and clubs keep it right between revisions.
Using the data
The whole list can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with every source, mark and date, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; please name Chess in Berlin when you reuse it.
Programs and language models find a plain-text map of the site at llms.txt.
Looked at and left out
Entries looked at and not listed: 12. They are clubs in towns outside the area, single tournaments with no second edition, the historic chess cafés of old Berlin, internal club championships, the German university championships, which no page places in Berlin, and a former club domain that now serves something else.
Pins on the map
An entry has a pin when its street address was found as a building in the OpenStreetMap address search; such a pin is marked approximate. Entries without a street address have none.
No pin is placed by hand, and the site draws no map of its own: the map link opens openstreetmap.org, and an entry with an address but no pin links to a map search for that address. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.