How we verify every entry

The area

The directory covers the cities of Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Mönchengladbach, Wuppertal, Solingen and Remscheid and every town of the Mettmann, Rhein-Kreis Neuss, Viersen and Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis counties, from Nettetal, Brüggen and Kempen in the west to Velbert, Wermelskirchen and Bergisch Gladbach in the east. Each entry names its town; inside Düsseldorf and the larger cities it also names the district when a page gives one.

Duisburg, Essen and the other Ruhr towns, Köln, Leverkusen and the Rhein-Erft county are not part of the area. No entry is graded or paid for; every list opens with the entry whose dated trace is newest, and closed or moved places stand at the end of the full list.

What an entry is built from

Clubs start from schach.in, the register behind the German Chess Federation’s club search, which names each club’s playing place. Each club’s own site was then read for dated news, and the league portal of the Niederrheinischer Schachverband supplied a played match of the 2026/27 season for most clubs; one Leichlingen club plays in the Mittelrhein leagues and is dated by their portal.

Tournaments come from the FIDE lists of rated events and the notices of the Düsseldorf chess district. A tournament that a club plays on its own evenings stays on that club’s entry; a series with an organiser and at least two dated editions has an entry of its own. School chess groups come from the schools’ own pages and the results of the NRW school chess championships; courses from the pages of the Volkshochschule Krefeld, the Junior Uni Wuppertal and the Hochschulsport Düsseldorf.

Every fact ends in a small number that links to its source, where a short quotation in the language of that page and the day of reading are shown. When two pages disagree, the entry cites both.

What the source marks say

Three marks sit next to every source. Official: the club, school, venue or organiser wrote it, or a chess federation did. Secondary: someone else reports it, for instance a register, a league portal, a tournament list or a newspaper. Unverified: the fact rests on posts by users or on one mention in passing.

A mark names the speaker; it does not vouch for the content. A row in a club register shows only that the club is registered, so an entry with nothing newer than such a row is shown as not confirmed.

Gaps that remain

League fixtures and club news are easy to find here; membership fees, and whether a visitor may simply drop in, are rarely written down. Several school groups appear only in championship results, and course programmes are renewed every term. A detail no page gives reads “not stated by sources”, which never stands for no.

A page that closes a gap can be sent through the form; it is read, dated and added at the next revision.

What the directory does not judge

• Clubs, school groups, courses and tournaments are never rated, scored or ranked.
• Everything rests on published pages; nobody visited the venues.
• Fees appear as printed on the day of reading and can be out of date.
• Club nights and school groups often shift with a new season or school year.
• Teaching is not assessed; trainer titles are only compared with the FIDE database.
• Step-free access, parking and the state of the rooms were not looked at.
• Nobody counts players, so no entry says how full an evening gets.
• Being in a register shows that a club exists, not that it meets this week.

Corrections from those listed

Anyone named or involved, from club boards and teachers to organisers, trainers, parents and players, can correct an entry through the form for clubs and corrections. A link to a page that shows the right detail makes the check quick.

Each accepted correction gets a date in the update history and appears on the entry. A club or person who prefers not to be listed can ask for that through the same form; the entry is then taken down at the next revision.

Reading dates and revisions

The sources behind the current entries were all read on 27 October 2026. Every source keeps its reading date, so you can see how old each piece of evidence is.

About every 6 months the directory is read through again from the start. Between two revisions a club can change its room or its night before the entry catches up; what the club or organiser publishes always takes precedence.

Who is behind it

Düsseldorf Chess is an independent editorial project. Clubs, schools, venues and organisers pay nothing for their entries, there is no advertising, and the project is not connected to the German Chess Federation, the Schachbund Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Niederrheinischer Schachverband or the Düsseldorf chess district.

It was started because chess in this area is scattered over a club register, two league portals, tournament lists, school news and dozens of club sites, each with one part of the picture. The form lets players and clubs keep it right between revisions.

Reusing the data

The directory is also published as a JSON dataset, with one record per entry and every source, mark and date. Its licence is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: reuse is free as long as Düsseldorf Chess is credited.

Language models and other programs can read a plain-text summary at llms.txt.

Looked at and left out

Candidates looked at and not listed: 43. Most are clubs with no dated page, halls that only hosted the events of an organiser listed elsewhere, map points with no chess on any page, or clubs from Duisburg, Köln, Leverkusen and other places outside the area.

Map positions

A position appears only when the address on the entry matched a building in the OpenStreetMap address search, or when a source page supplies one, and it is always marked as approximate. Where an address has no position, a button looks the address up on a map instead.

Positions are never set by hand, and the site has no map of its own. The map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.