How entries are checked
Ruhr Chess puts the clubs, tournaments, youth groups and open chess meetings of the Metropole Ruhr in one place. Below: the pages it reads, how an entry is built from them, and the limits of the guide.
Area covered
The guide covers the Metropole Ruhr, the area of the Regionalverband Ruhr: its fifty-three towns and cities, that is Duisburg, Oberhausen, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Bottrop, Bochum, Herne, Dortmund, Hagen and Hamm, and every town of the Wesel, Recklinghausen, Unna and Ennepe-Ruhr districts. Inside a town an entry names the district as the source gives it, such as Wanne-Eickel in Herne or Rheinhausen in Duisburg.
Clubs just across the boundary, in Krefeld, Velbert, Ratingen or Iserlohn, stay out even when they share a league with Ruhr teams. There are no grades, no ranks and no paid or promoted entries; every list opens with the newest evidence, and places that closed or moved are kept at the foot of the page that lists everything.
Where the facts come from
The first source is schach.in, the club database that feeds the German Chess Federation's club finder and names where each club plays. Team play is dated by the results portals of the Schachverband Ruhrgebiet and the Niederrheinischer Schachverband, which list every round with its day. Club nights, youth groups and tournament dates come from FIDE's monthly rated-tournament reports, from city press releases and event calendars and from the clubs' own websites.
Behind each fact sits a numbered link to its source; there the guide quotes a few words of the page in its own language, usually German, and gives the day the page was opened. The text of the entry restates those quotations and nothing more.
When pages contradict each other, say the database and the club on where the club plays, the club's own page wins and the entry mentions the difference.
Source marks
Three marks say who published a source. Official: the place, its organiser or a chess federation. Secondary: someone else, such as a club database, a city calendar or a newspaper. Unverified: one mention, or a message sent in, that no second page supports.
A mark names the speaker; it does not vouch for the content. A results table may still carry a team long after its club stopped meeting on weekday evenings, so how old the evidence is counts for as much as who gave it.
What the pages leave open
Membership fees are rarely published by Ruhr clubs, and even fewer pages say whether a stranger may join in on a club night. Such gaps read "not stated by sources" on the entry; a blank never stands for no.
Anyone who knows a page with the answer can pass the link on through the form; it is read at the next revision and the fact goes in with its date.
What is not judged
- Clubs, tournaments, schools, courses and venues receive no grade, score or rank.
- Every entry rests on published pages; the guide sends nobody to the club rooms.
- Fees appear only as a page printed them on the day it was opened.
- Youth groups run by the school year and leagues by the season; both may shift before the next revision.
- Training quality goes unjudged; a trainer's title is only checked against the FIDE record.
- Wheelchair access, parking and similar practical matters are outside the guide.
- Nobody counts heads; an entry cannot say how full a club night is.
- A blank answer stands for a silent source, never for a no.
If an entry is about you
Anyone an entry concerns, from club boards and youth officers to organisers, schools, meeting-centre staff and players, can put it right through the form. Adding a link to a page with the right fact speeds things up.
Accepted corrections are dated under changes and fixes and noted on the entry itself. A place that would rather not appear can ask for that through the same form; the entry then goes at the next revision.
Dates and revisions
The pages behind today's entries were all opened on ; each source on an entry shows its own date, so you can always tell how fresh a piece of evidence is.
Roughly every 6 months the whole guide is read through again. Between two readings a club can change room or evening before its entry follows; until then, trust the club's own page.
Who is behind it
Ruhr Chess is run as an independent editorial project. No club, organiser, school or venue pays for it, it carries no advertising, and it is not linked to the Schachverband Ruhrgebiet, the Schachbund Nordrhein-Westfalen, the German Chess Federation or any club.
The guide exists because the chess of the region is scattered: a club database here, two league portals there, a rating report, city calendars and the websites of the clubs, each showing a fragment. Players and clubs keep it up to date between revisions through the form.
Reusing the data
Everything in the guide can be downloaded as one JSON file: a record per entry with all its sources, marks and dates, released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Reusers are asked to name Ruhr Chess.
For language models and other programs there is a plain-text overview at llms.txt.
Looked at and left out
Considered but not listed: 21. Most often the reason is a club outside the Metropole Ruhr, a club with no dated trace from the last two years, a tournament held only once, or a map point with neither a name nor a second source.
Map pins
A pin appears when a source supplies a map position, or when the OpenStreetMap address search finds the address as a building; pins of the second kind are labelled approximate. An address without a pin gets a map button that searches for it.
Pins are never placed by hand, and the site draws no maps itself. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).