About this guide
What follows explains what the guide covers, how a fact gets onto a card, what the three source flags mean, what the guide deliberately does not judge, and how anyone can have an entry corrected.
What the guide is for
Chess in Madrid lists the places and recurring events where people play, learn or buy chess in person in the city of Madrid and the municipalities of the Comunidad de Madrid: clubs, tournament series, bars and cafés, open-air sessions, players' groups, schools and academies, school and university chess, and shops.
It exists to give the over-the-board community a reference point, whether you have just landed in the city and want a game on Friday or you are a parent comparing club schools. Nothing in it is scored or put in an order of merit. A card states what the sources state and stops there.
How a fact reaches a card
The work starts from pages anyone can open: the venue and league pages of the Federación Madrileña de Ajedrez, clubs' own sites and social pages, the regional tournament calendar, district and town council notices, tournament records, the press and map listings. A place gets a card only if it has a name and a page that could be opened and read.
Every fact is stored with the page it came from, a flag and the day the page was read. Quotes are short and stay in the language of the source, which is nearly always Spanish; names are not translated. An entry's chess status follows the most recent dated sign of chess there, for instance a league venue listing, a calendar entry or a dated post.
The three flags
Official: the place, its organiser or the federation published the fact. Secondary: a third party reported it, such as a newspaper, a directory or a listing site. Unverified: it comes from user posts, or from a single page that no other source supports.
The flag tells you about the source and never about the place. An official page can be stale and an unverified remark can be true, which is why the date read sits next to every flag.
Blank lines
Much of what a visitor wants to know is never published: the evening a club meets, the fee, whether guests may come. The federation's venue list, the source for most club addresses, states none of it. Such lines read "not stated by sources". They are not filled by inference, and a blank line is no mark against a club.
Anyone who knows the answer and can point to a page that shows it can send it through the form.
What the guide does not judge
- How strong a club's players or teams are.
- How good the teaching is, or how a school's pupils perform.
- Whether a room is friendly, lively or comfortable for a first visit.
- Prices that no page prints; nobody is asked for a quote.
- Whether a given evening actually took place; a card records the latest dated trace and not attendance.
- Step-free access, unless a source describes it.
- Online-only chess: an entry needs a place or an event where people meet.
- Any score, star or order of merit: none is calculated anywhere on the site.
Replies and corrections
A club, an organiser or any player may ask for a line to be corrected, added or taken down by using the form. Messages are kept and gone through together when the guide is next refreshed; cards are not edited one by one in the meantime.
A line changes once a page that can be opened backs the change. Each correction gets a date in the log and is shown on the card concerned. A reply is sent only when the message asks for one and gives a contact.
Dates and refresh waves
For this edition the sources were read between and .
The guide is refreshed in waves, roughly every 6 months. A wave re-opens the pages behind the cards, takes in the messages received since the previous one and writes the changes into the log. Between two waves the pages stay as they were published.
Who is behind it
Chess in Madrid is an independent editorial project. No club, federation or company owns it, and a listing cannot be bought, sponsored or moved up.
Cards carry no bylines. The guide asks to be judged on its sources, and every line can be checked by opening the page linked beside it. The editors are reached the same way as everybody else, through the form.
The data, open
The full guide can be downloaded as a JSON dataset under CC BY 4.0, carrying each fact with its flag, date and source. For language models there is an llms.txt file. If you reuse the data, credit Chess in Madrid and keep the dates with the facts.
Left out of this edition
18 candidates were looked at and not listed: events held once, clubs' internal tournaments, bars whose sources mention board games but not chess, duplicates, online-only clubs and places beyond the region's borders. The dataset names each one with the reason.
Map points
A card's map point comes from OpenStreetMap, from a map link the place itself publishes or from a Google Maps listing. Failing those, the street address was run through OpenStreetMap's search service, and the card marks that point as approximate.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Map links lead to openstreetmap.org; no map tiles are loaded on this site.