How each listing is sourced

The region

The guide covers the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region, which reaches into three German states: Mannheim, Heidelberg and the Rhein-Neckar and Neckar-Odenwald districts in Baden-Württemberg; the Bergstraße district in Hesse; and Ludwigshafen, Speyer, Frankenthal, Worms, Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Landau and the Rhein-Pfalz, Bad Dürkheim, Germersheim and Südliche Weinstraße districts in Rhineland-Palatinate. Every listing names its town; in Mannheim, Heidelberg and Ludwigshafen it also names the Stadtteil when a page gives one.

Nothing in the guide is graded or paid for. Each list starts with the listing whose dated trace is the most recent, and places that have closed or moved stay at the end of the full list.

What the listings are built from

The clubs come from schach.in, the club register behind the German Chess Federation’s club finder, which gives each club’s playing place. Every club site that opened was then read for dated news and a weekly timetable. Where a club’s own site was down or silent, the league portals of the Baden and Hessian chess federations supplied dated fixtures of the current season, and the notices clubs place in the gazettes of their towns filled further gaps.

The opens come from their organisers’ pages, the tournament database of the German Chess Federation and the club news of the Palatinate chess federation; a tournament a club plays among its members stays on that club’s listing. School groups come from the schools’ own pages, the academy courses from the Hector Children’s Academy course lists, and the café and community meetings from the city of Mannheim’s event calendar and the programmes of the houses themselves.

Every fact ends in a small number linking to its source, with a short quotation in the language of that page and the day it was read. Where two pages disagree, the listing cites both.

Source marks

Official marks a page published by the club, the school, the venue, the organiser or a chess federation. Secondary marks a report by someone else: a league portal, a tournament list, a city calendar or another club’s news. Unverified marks a fact that rests on user posts or a single passing mention.

A mark says who is speaking, not whether they are right. A line in the club register shows that a club is registered, not that it met last week, so a club known only from the register or from another club’s fixture list reads as not confirmed.

What remains open

Clubs in the region publish league reports and club news readily, but rarely fees, and seldom say outright whether a visitor may simply turn up. Several club sites state a weekly timetable without any dated post, and school groups often appear only in a school’s list of working groups for the year. Whatever no page states reads “not stated by sources”; an empty field never means no.

A page that fills a gap can be sent in through the form; we check it, date it and add it at the next revision.

What the guide does not judge

• No club, school, course, meeting place or tournament is rated or ranked against another.
• Every listing rests on published pages; no venue is visited for the guide.
• Fees appear as printed on the day of reading and may have changed since.
• Club nights and youth training often shift with the school holidays and the new league season.
• The quality of teaching is not assessed; coaches’ titles are only compared with the FIDE database.
• Step-free access, parking and the state of the rooms are not looked at.
• Attendance is not counted, so no listing says how busy an evening gets.
• A line in a club register shows that a club exists, not that it meets this week.

Corrections from those listed

Club officials, teachers, organisers, coaches, parents and players can correct any listing through the form. A link to a page with the right information makes a correction quick to check.

Each accepted correction is dated in the revisions to the list and shown on the listing itself. A club or a person who would rather not be listed can say so through the same form, and the listing comes off at the next revision.

Reading dates and revisions

The sources of the current listings were read between 25 October 2026 and 27 October 2026, and every source shows its own reading date, so the age of each piece of evidence stays in view.

About every 6 months the whole guide is read again. In between, a club may move its room or its evening before the listing catches up; the club’s or the organiser’s own page always has the last word.

Who is behind it

Rhein-Neckar Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, schools, venues or organisers, carries no advertising and has no ties to the Baden, Hessian or Palatinate chess federations or to the German Chess Federation.

It exists because the region’s chess is spread over a club register, two league portals, tournament lists, municipal gazettes and dozens of club pages, each holding one piece of the picture. The form lets players and clubs keep it right between revisions.

Reusing the data

The whole guide is available as a JSON dataset, one record per listing with every source, mark and date. It is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and may be reused freely, provided Rhein-Neckar Chess is named.

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

Looked at and left out

Candidates looked at and not listed: 31. Most are clubs and events outside the region, one-off occasions with no second dated edition, club tournaments and school circles kept on their club’s listing, or school working groups whose pages carry no date.

Map positions

A listing gets a map position only when its address matched a building in the OpenStreetMap address search or a source page gives one; such positions are marked as approximate. A listing with an address but no position offers a button that looks the address up on a map.

No position is placed by hand, and the site draws no map of its own. Map data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database Licence.