How entries get verified

The area covered

The guide covers the city of Karlsruhe, the cities of Baden-Baden and Pforzheim, and every town of the Landkreis Karlsruhe and the Rastatt, Enzkreis and Calw counties. That takes in the Hardt villages north of Karlsruhe, the edge of the Kraichgau around Bretten and Sulzfeld, the Murg valley from Rastatt up to Gernsbach, and the northern Black Forest from Bad Herrenalb to Calw and Simmersfeld. Every entry names its town, and inside Karlsruhe and the larger towns also the district when a page gives one.

Heidelberg, Mannheim and the rest of the Rhine-Neckar area, the Stuttgart region and the Palatinate across the Rhine lie outside it. No entry is graded or paid for; every list starts with the entry whose dated trace is newest, and closed or moved places come last on the full list.

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 venue and often its evening. The league portal of the Badischer Schachverband then supplied nearly every club with a match from the first rounds of the 2026/27 season; one club, in Heimsheim, belongs to the Württemberg federation instead. Where a club has a site, or prints notices in its town’s gazette, those pages were read for dated news.

Opens come from their organisers’ pages and the FIDE rating database; a tournament that a club runs on its own evenings stays on that club’s entry. School chess groups come from the schools’ working-group lists, the Hector courses from the academy’s course pages, the other courses from the pages of the Schachschule Karlsruhe, Schach für Kinder and the Volkshochschule Baden-Baden, and the two senior groups from the Ettlingen gazette.

Every fact ends in a small number linking to its source, where a short quotation in the page’s own language and the day it was read are shown. When two pages disagree, the entry quotes both.

What the marks mean

Each source carries one of three marks. Official: the club, school, organiser or a chess federation published it. Secondary: another party reports it, such as a register, a league portal, a rating database or a newspaper. Unverified: the fact rests on users’ posts or on a single passing mention.

A mark tells who is speaking, not whether the content is right. A register row only shows that a club is registered, so an entry with nothing newer than that row is shown as not confirmed.

What stays open

League matches and club evenings are easy to find in this area; membership fees, and whether a visitor can simply turn up, are seldom written down. School working-group lists change every school year and course programmes every term. A detail no page gives reads “not stated by sources”, which never means no.

Anyone holding a page that settles one of these points can pass it on through the form; it is read and dated at the next revision.

What the guide does not judge

• Clubs, courses, school groups and opens are listed, never rated, scored or ranked.
• All facts come from pages anyone can open; nobody went to the venues.
• Fees appear as the pages printed them on the day of reading.
• Evenings and working groups tend to change with each season and school year.
• Teaching is not judged; a trainer’s title is only compared with the FIDE database.
• Wheelchair access, parking and the state of the rooms were not checked.
• There is no head count, so nothing here tells you how full an evening gets.
• A club in the register is a club on paper; only a dated page shows that it still plays.

Replies from those listed

Clubs, schools, organisers, trainers, parents and players can correct any entry through the form for clubs and courses. With a link to a page showing the right detail, the check takes little time.

Accepted corrections are dated in the list of changes and shown on the entry. A club or person who does not want to be listed can say so through the same form, and the entry comes down at the next revision.

When the pages were read

Every source behind the current entries was read on 27 October 2026. Each source keeps its reading date, so the age of every piece of evidence stays visible.

Roughly every 6 months the whole guide is read again from scratch. In between, a club may move rooms or change its evening before the entry follows; what the club or organiser publishes always comes first.

Who runs it

Karlsruhe Chess is an independent editorial project. Nobody pays to be listed, there is no advertising, and the guide has no tie to the German Chess Federation, the Badischer Schachverband, the Schachverband Württemberg or any chess district.

It exists because the chess of this region is spread over a club register, a league portal, gazette notices, school pages and dozens of club sites, each holding one piece. Between revisions, players and clubs can keep it accurate through the form.

Using the data

The whole guide is also published as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with every source, mark and date. Its licence, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, allows any reuse that credits Karlsruhe Chess.

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

Looked at, not listed

Candidates examined and left out: 22. Most are register entries with no team and no dated page, a dissolved club, events and school groups folded into the entry of the club that runs them, and clubs from towns outside the four counties.

Map points

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

Points are never placed by hand, and the site draws no map of its own. The underlying map data belongs to the OpenStreetMap contributors and is shared under the Open Database Licence.