How Nuremberg entries are checked

The area covered

The directory covers the cities of Nürnberg, Fürth, Erlangen and Schwabach and every town of six counties: the Landkreis Fürth, Erlangen-Höchstadt, the Nürnberger Land, the Landkreis Roth, the Landkreis Forchheim and the Landkreis Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, which lies across the border of Middle Franconia in the Upper Palatinate. Each entry names its own town.

Ansbach, Bamberg and the Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen county lie outside, and so do the clubs that the register lists within fifty kilometres but that play beyond these borders. The city has been a chess city for a long time; the international tournament of 1896 was played here, and Siegbert Tarrasch lived and played in Nuremberg. That history is context, not a measure: no entry is graded by age, size or strength.

What an entry rests on

Clubs start from schach.in, the register behind the German Chess Federation’s club search, which gives each club’s playing place; the league portal of the Bavarian Chess Federation then dates the clubs whose own pages are quiet, through the fixtures of their teams. Club sites add the evenings, youth training and news.

Opens come from the organisers’ pages and the FIDE list of rated tournaments; a tournament that a club holds only for itself stays on the club’s entry. Seniors’ rounds, the neighbourhood centre and the courses come from the programmes of the City of Nuremberg, municipal gazettes and the providers’ own pages; school groups from the schools’ news and elective lists.

Every fact ends in a small number that links to its source, where a short quotation in the language of the page and the day it was read are shown. When two pages disagree, the entry follows the more specific or the more recent one and says so.

What the source marks mean

Three marks sort the sources. Official means that the club, school, organiser, city or a chess federation put it out. Secondary means someone else reports it: a register, a league portal, a newspaper. Unverified means that a user post or a single passing mention is all there is.

The mark names the speaker; it does not vouch for the content. A register row proves only that a club is registered, so an entry with nothing later than that row reads as not confirmed until a dated page appears.

What stays open

Around Nuremberg the league fixtures and club evenings are well documented; the membership fee, and whether a stranger may simply walk in, rarely are. Gaps stay gaps: the entry prints “not stated by sources”, and the visitor cue appears only where a page gives an invitation.

A page that closes one of these gaps can be sent in through the form. It is opened, dated and worked in at the next revision.

What the directory does not judge

• No club, open, course or school group is rated, scored or put in an order of merit.
• All facts were read on pages open to anyone; nobody went to the rooms in person.
• Fees stand as printed on the day the page was read.
• Club nights, rooms and school electives shift with the season and the school year.
• The quality of teaching is not judged; a trainer’s stated title is only held against the FIDE database.
• Step-free access, parking and the condition of the rooms were not looked at.
• Attendance was not counted, so no entry says how full an evening gets.
• A register entry is a club on paper; a dated page is what shows it still plays.

Replies from those listed

Any club, school, organiser, trainer, parent or player can correct an entry through the form for reporting a chess place. With a link to a page that prints the right detail, the change is made at the next revision.

Each accepted correction gets a dated line in the revision notes and a note on the entry. A club, school or person who would rather not appear can ask through the same form; the entry then goes at the next revision.

When the pages were read

The sources behind the current entries were read from 27 October 2026 to 28 October 2026. Every source keeps its own reading date, so each entry shows how old its evidence is.

Roughly every 6 months the directory is read through again from the first entry. In between, a club may change its room or its evening before the entry catches up; the dates on the entry tell how fresh it is.

Who is behind it

Nuremberg Chess is an independent editorial project. No one pays for an entry, no advertising is carried, and there is no link to the Bavarian Chess Federation, the Middle Franconian chess district or any club.

It was started because chess here is scattered: a register, a league portal, city programmes, gazettes, school news and dozens of club sites each hold one piece. Laid side by side, each with its date, they show where a game can be had this week.

Using the data

The full directory is published as a JSON dataset: one record per entry, with each source, mark and reading date. The licence is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, so it may be reused freely with Nuremberg Chess named as the source.

A plain-text overview for language models and other software sits at llms.txt.

Looked at, left out

Candidates looked at and left out: 27. Mostly clubs that play beyond the covered towns, tournaments and school groups merged into the club or school behind them, and places without any dated page a reader could open.

Map points

An entry gets a map point only when its address matched a building in the OpenStreetMap address search or a source page gives the point; it is marked as approximate. Plenty of entries have an address and no point.

No point is set by hand, and the site has no map of its own; map links open OpenStreetMap, whose data belongs to its contributors and is shared under the Open Database License.