Editorial notes
What the directory covers, which pages its facts are taken from, how a fact is flagged and dated, what the directory declines to judge, and how anyone can ask for a change.
What Valencia Chess covers
Valencia Chess lists the places and events where chess is played face to face in Valencia and the towns of its metropolitan area: clubs, tournaments that return, bars and cafés where players meet, chess schools and associations that teach, and the halls where the game has a standing home.
It exists to give the local chess community, and anyone looking for a game or a class nearby, a dated reference. An entry is a description, never a recommendation: nothing here is scored, starred or placed in an order of merit.
The pages behind the facts
Entries are built from pages anyone can open: the sites and blogs of the clubs, the league tables and tournament pages of the Valencian federation, the federation tournament platform where organisers publish their bases, town-hall and municipal sports-foundation reports, Meetup events and the local press. A place is listed only when it has a name and at least one such page.
A 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, Spanish or Valencian; names of clubs, streets and tournaments are never translated. The chess status of an entry follows its most recent dated trace: a tournament played, a news item, an announced date.
Three flags: official, secondary, unverified
Official is what the place, its organiser or the federation says about itself. Secondary is what a third party reports: a results directory, a newspaper, a list kept by another organiser. Unverified is a user post or a claim found on one page only, with nothing else to support it.
The flag grades the source and says nothing about the place. A club's own page can be years stale, and a lone forum post can be accurate, which is why every flag stands next to the date the page was read.
Blank lines and league-only clubs
Much of what a visitor wants to know is not published: whether guests may come, what an evening costs, where exactly a club meets. In those cases the card reads "not stated by sources". Nothing is filled in by inference, and a blank line is not a mark against anyone.
This matters more here than in most cities. The federation's own club list could not be read while this edition was prepared, so a number of clubs are known only from league tables and tournament pages: name and town, no club room, no hours. Their cards are short on purpose. If you can point to a page with the missing detail, send it through the form.
What the directory does not judge
- How strong a club, a team or a player is.
- How good a coach or a school is, or how its pupils fare.
- The mood of a club night, or how a first-time visitor will be received.
- Any price that a source does not publish; no place is asked for a quote.
- Whether a given evening actually took place: the record is the latest dated trace, not a head count.
- Step-free access and similar features of a building, unless a source describes them.
- Online-only chess: an entry needs a place where people sit across a board.
- Marks, stars or rankings of any sort: none are calculated and none are borrowed.
Corrections and the right of reply
A club, an organiser, a bar owner or a player can ask for an entry to be corrected, completed or taken down through the contribution form. Messages are kept and read together when the directory is next revised; cards are not edited one by one in the meantime.
A change is made when a page we can open backs it. Each one is dated in the revisions and noted on the card it touches. Nobody is written to unless the message itself asks for an answer and gives a way to send one.
Reading dates and revision rounds
The pages behind this edition were read between and .
The directory is revised in rounds, roughly every 6 months. A round reads the sources of every card again, takes in the messages received since the previous one and writes each change into the revisions. Between two rounds the directory stays as it was published.
Who is behind it
Valencia Chess is an independent editorial project. It belongs to no club, federation or company, carries no advertising, and no entry pays to appear or to appear earlier.
Cards are unsigned because the sources are the authority: every line can be checked by following its link. The form is the one channel in, for the editors' own corrections as for everyone else's.
The data, free to reuse
The full directory is available as a JSON dataset under the CC BY 4.0 licence, with each fact, its flag, its date and its source. Programs and language models can begin at llms.txt. When you reuse the data, credit Valencia Chess and keep the dates attached.
Candidates that were not listed
11 candidates were examined and kept out: board-game nights where chess is not named, clubs and events beyond the metropolitan area, halls that only host a tournament, town-fiesta events whose pages name no organiser, and federation championship cycles played at clubs already listed. The dataset names each one with its reason.
Positions on the map
Where a card shows a map position, it was obtained by looking the published street address up in the OpenStreetMap search service, and the card marks it as approximate. Entries without a published address carry no position at all.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, made available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). A map link leads to openstreetmap.org; the pages of this site load no map tiles.