How listings are confirmed
Frankfurt Chess brings the chess clubs, youth training, school teams and tournaments of Rhein-Main together on one site. This page sets out the area, the pages that are read, how an entry is built and where it stops.
The area covered
The guide covers Rhein-Main: Frankfurt am Main with its city districts, Offenbach am Main, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden and Mainz, and the towns of the Offenbach, Main-Taunus, Hochtaunus, Main-Kinzig, Wetterau, Groß-Gerau, Darmstadt-Dieburg and Rheingau-Taunus counties. Inside Frankfurt an entry names the city district its source gives, such as Höchst, Bornheim or Nieder-Erlenbach; elsewhere it names the town and, where a page prints it, the district.
Clubs beyond those counties, in Aschaffenburg, Gießen, Limburg or along the Bergstraße, are left out even when they share a league with clubs of the area. Nothing is graded or advertised: each list starts with the freshest dated evidence, and places that closed or moved stay at the foot of the full list.
Where the facts come from
The starting point is schach.in, the club register behind the German Chess Federation's club finder, read entry by entry. League play is dated through the league portal of the Hessian chess federation, which lists every match with its day; the tournaments' own sites, the pages of the Frankfurt chess district and FIDE's list of rated tournaments date the opens and championships; and the clubs' own websites, city pages and published programmes give the club evenings, youth groups and news.
Each fact on an entry carries a small numbered link to its source, where a short quotation in the page's own language, usually German, and the day the page was read appear. The entry says no more than those quotations do. A club that publishes little is sometimes dated through a league result or a report by another club, and its entry says so.
Where the register and a club's own site disagree, about a room or a starting time for instance, the club's site is followed and the difference is noted.
Source marks
Official: published by the place itself, its organiser or a chess federation. Secondary: published by someone else, such as a register, a city page or a newspaper. Unverified: a lone mention, or a reader's message, that no second page supports.
A mark tells who is speaking, not whether the statement still holds: a register can keep a club evening long after it has moved, which is why the date of the evidence counts as much as its origin.
When the sources say nothing
Few clubs in the region write down their membership fee, what a guest evening costs or whether a stranger can simply walk in. Where the pages are silent, the entry reads "not given in the sources"; a blank is never a no.
Anyone who knows a page that answers such a question can send its link through the form; the fact is added, with its date, when the guide is next revised.
What the guide does not measure
- No club, course, school or tournament is rated, scored or ranked.
- Entries rest on published pages; nobody visits the club rooms on the guide's behalf.
- Fees appear only as a page printed them on the day it was read.
- Youth groups follow the school year and teams the league season, so both can shift between revisions.
- Training quality is not judged; a trainer's title is only set against FIDE's record.
- Step-free access, parking and similar practical matters are covered only where a source states them.
- Turnout is not counted, so an entry cannot say how busy a club evening gets.
- A missing answer means the sources are silent, not that the answer is no.
If an entry is about you
Clubs, youth leaders, organisers, schools and players named in an entry can ask for a change through the form, ideally with a link to a page that shows the right fact.
Each correction is dated in the corrections log and shown on the entry itself. A place that would rather not appear can say so through the same form, and its entry is removed at the next revision.
Dates and revisions
The source pages behind the present entries were all read on , and every source on an entry shows its own date, so the age of each piece of evidence stays in view.
Roughly every 6 months the whole guide is read again. In between, a club may change its room or its evening before the entry catches up; its own website then has the last word.
Who is behind it
Frankfurt Chess is an independent editorial project. No club, organiser, school or venue pays to appear, the site carries no advertising, and it has no tie to the Hessian chess federation, the Frankfurt chess district, the German Chess Federation or any club.
It exists because the region's chess is scattered across the web: a register in one place, a league portal in another, rating lists, city pages and dozens of club websites, each holding a piece. Between revisions, readers keep it current through the form.
Reusing the data
The whole guide can be downloaded as one JSON file, a record per entry with every source, mark and date, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; please credit Frankfurt Chess when reusing it.
A plain-text summary for software and language models is at llms.txt.
Looked at, left out
Read but not turned into entries: 35. Typical reasons are a club or school group with no dated trace of its own in the last two years, a federation championship rather than a place, a one-off event, or a tournament series that now sits on the entry of its club.
Map pins
A pin appears when a source gives a map position, or when the OpenStreetMap address search matches the address to a building; pins found the second way are marked approximate. An address without a pin comes with a button that looks it up on a map.
No pin is placed by hand, and the site draws no maps itself. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database Licence (ODbL).