Notes on method

Area and scope

The area is the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the neighbouring towns of Norderstedt, Pinneberg, Wedel, Ahrensburg, Großhansdorf, Reinbek, Glinde, Quickborn and Buxtehude. An entry from one of those towns carries the town's name; everything inside the city carries Hamburg.

No entry is rated, scored or paid for, and none is moved ahead of another. Within each list the entries with the newest dated trace come first; closed or moved places stay at the end of the full list.

Pages read for an entry

Hamburg chess is unusually well documented by its federation. The Hamburger Schachverband publishes a register of its clubs and chess departments with the address of the playing room, the club night and a map position, and a calendar that keeps every dated event, from league rounds to club tournaments, with the notice of each edition. Those two pages are the backbone of the guide.

Then come the clubs' own websites, the pages of the Hamburger Schachjugendbund, the Schachverband Schleswig-Holstein for the clubs north of the city line, the chess-results tournament server and a few other pages such as the sites of a chess school, a café and the Alster tournament.

Every fact in an entry ends in a small number that leads to its source, with a short quotation in the language of the page and the day the page was opened. Where two pages disagree, for example on the room of a club evening, the entry keeps both and says which page says what.

Source marks

A source is marked official when it comes from the place itself, its organiser or a federation; secondary when a third party reports it, such as a tournament server, a magazine or a listing; and unverified when it rests on users' posts or a single stray mention.

The mark says who is speaking, not whether they are right. A line in the federation register shows that a club exists and where it says it plays; the latest dated trace, such as a league fixture or a tournament notice, shows that chess is still happening there.

What stays open

Hamburg clubs rarely publish their fees, and few say in so many words whether a visitor may simply walk in. Where no page answers, the entry reads “not stated by sources”; an empty field never means no.

Anyone who knows a page that fills a gap can send it through the form. It is checked and added with its date at the next revision.

What the guide does not judge

• No club, tournament, course or trainer receives a grade, a score or a rank.
• The entries rest on published pages; nobody visits the rooms for the guide.
• Entry fees and course prices are copied as printed on the day the page was opened and may have changed.
• Club nights follow the season and the school holidays and can change before an entry does.
• The quality of teaching is not assessed, and a trainer's title is only compared with the FIDE record.
• Stairs, lifts, parking and other practical details of a room are not checked.
• Attendance is not counted, so an entry cannot say how many players turn up.
• A line in the federation register proves membership, not that a board is set up tonight.

If an entry concerns you

Club officers, organisers, trainers, parents and players can correct an entry through the form. A link to a page that shows the right information makes the change quick.

Every accepted correction is dated in the listing changes and noted in the entry concerned. A club or person who would rather not be listed can say so through the same form, and the entry is removed at the next revision.

Dates and revisions

The pages behind the present entries were opened on 21 October 2026. The date beside each source shows how old that piece of evidence is.

The whole guide is due to be read again about every 6 months. Between revisions a club may change its room or its night before its entry catches up; the club's own page always has the last word.

Who is behind it

Hamburg Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organisers, schools or venues, carries no advertising for them and has no link to the Hamburger Schachverband or any other chess federation.

It exists because Hamburg chess is spread over a federation register, a long calendar and dozens of club websites, each holding one part of the picture. The form is how players and clubs can keep it right between revisions.

Reusing the data

The whole guide can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with every source, mark and date. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; please credit Hamburg Chess when you reuse it.

Software and language models will find a plain-text map of the guide at llms.txt.

Considered and left out

Entries considered and not listed: 10. Most are internal club championships, one-off events such as simultaneous displays, tournaments in towns outside the area, and a duplicate of a listed tournament.

Map pins

An entry has a pin when the federation's map page gives a position for the club's room, or when its address was found as a building in the OpenStreetMap address search; a pin from the search is marked approximate. Entries without a street have none.

No pin is set by hand, and the guide has no map of its own: the map link opens openstreetmap.org, and an entry with a street address but no pin links to a map search for that address instead. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.