How places are verified

What the directory covers

It covers the city of Riyadh: clubs that organise or play chess, cafés with a chess evening, academies that teach, series of tournaments that return, and halls that host them again and again. A university, school or tea house that hosted a single event is left out, as are clubs whose events are all in other cities of the kingdom.

No listing is scored, ranked or recommended, and none is paid for. Each list opens with the place whose pages show chess most recently.

Which pages were read

The Saudi Chess Federation publishes no list of clubs, so the directory starts from tournaments. The public server chess-results.com was searched for Saudi events from 2025 to 2027 and filtered to Riyadh by organiser, venue and title; tournament pages give the organiser and the location line. The FIDE list of rated events, the federation’s news notices, a Meetup group and the academies’ own sites add the rest.

Instagram, X and WhatsApp, where many Riyadh clubs post, were not read. Every fact ends in a small number that leads to its source, with a short quotation in the original language and the date the page was opened.

Official, secondary and unverified

Official marks a page published by the place itself, its organiser, the federation or a public body. Secondary marks a report by someone else: the tournament server, a directory, an event platform. Unverified marks something posted by users or found in one place only.

The mark tells who is speaking, not whether they are right: a tournament page can carry a hall that was later changed, and an academy’s own site can promise more than it runs.

What remains unknown

Very few Riyadh pages print a street address, a weekly hour, a fee or whether a newcomer can sit down for a game. Where no page says, the listing reads “not stated by sources” and does not infer an answer from the kind of place.

Anyone who knows a page answering one of these questions can send it through the form, and the fact is added with that page as its source.

What the directory does not judge

• No club, café, academy, coach or event receives a score, a grade or a rank.
• Listings rest on published pages; nobody visits the places on behalf of the directory.
• Fees are copied from the page that prints them and are not confirmed with the organiser.
• Days and times come from published notices and may change before the listing does.
• Neither the strength of the players nor the standard of the lessons is assessed.
• Seating, air conditioning, separate sections and noise are not checked.
• Attendance at events and café evenings is not counted.
• An empty line means that no page answers it, never that the answer is no.

If a listing concerns you

Organisers, café owners, coaches, parents and players can correct any listing through the form. A link to a page that shows the right information makes the change quick to confirm. Messages are reviewed together at the next revision.

Each change is dated in the list revisions and noted on the listing it concerns. A club or café that prefers not to appear can say so through the same form and give its reason.

When the pages were opened, and what comes next

The pages behind the current listings were opened between 15 October 2026 and 15 October 2026. The date beside each source shows how fresh that particular fact is.

The whole directory is due to be read again about every 6 months. In between, a club may change halls or a café evening may stop before its listing follows. Each revision of the data or of these rules is entered in the list revisions, newest first, and earlier lines are left as written.

Who is behind it

Riyadh Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, cafés, academies or organisers, shows no advertising, and nobody pays to be listed or to be taken off.

It exists because chess in Riyadh is scattered across federation notices, tournament pages and event listings, each naming a club and a date and little else. Read side by side they show where the game is played, and this directory keeps that reading in one place together with its sources.

Reusing the data

The full directory can be downloaded as a JSON dataset: one record per place, with every source, mark and date. The licence is given inside the file.

Programs and language models can read a plain-text outline at llms.txt.

Checked and left out

Leads checked and not listed: 12. The usual reasons are a campus, school or tea house that hosted one event, a one-off federation championship, a club whose events are all outside Riyadh, or a name that no page ties to the city. The dataset gives every lead with its reason.

Pins on the map

A listing gets a pin only when a source gives coordinates, such as the map link on a tournament or programme page, or when the OpenStreetMap address search finds the building itself. Riyadh pages seldom print a street, so most listings have no pin.

No pin is set by hand. The site draws no map of its own: the map button opens openstreetmap.org, and pins taken from OpenStreetMap are credited on the listing.