How the directory is sourced
Paris Chess gathers the clubs, tournaments, chess schools and cafés of Paris and the petite couronne in one place. This page sets out what is read, how an entry is put together and where the directory stops.
The area
The area is the city of Paris, listed arrondissement by arrondissement, and the communes of the three departments that border it: Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne. Clubs in Yvelines, Essonne, Val-d'Oise and Seine-et-Marne are left out, even when Parisians travel to them for a weekend open. Commune names are spelled as the communes spell them, hyphens and accents included.
No entry is rated, ranked or paid for, and none is lifted above another. Every list starts with the entries whose evidence is most recent; places that have closed or moved stay at the foot of the page that shows every entry.
Where the facts come from
The base layer is the club register of the Fédération Française des Échecs: one page per affiliated club, giving its hall and its weekly timetable. Dates come from the FIDE list of rated tournaments, where each event has a title and a date, and from the clubs' own sites, blogs and news pages, read for posts on the new season, courses and results.
Every fact on an entry ends in a small number that leads to its source: a short quotation in the language of the page, usually French, and the day the page was read. The text of an entry sums up those quotations and adds nothing that no page states.
Where two pages disagree, say the register and a club's own site on the hours of a session, the entry gives both and does not settle the matter silently.
Three kinds of source
Official: the page comes from the place itself, from its organiser or from a chess body such as the federation. Secondary: a third party reports it, a venue guide or a newspaper for instance. Unverified: a contribution from a user, or a single mention with nothing behind it.
The mark tells you who is speaking, not whether they are right. A register timetable can outlast the season it was written for, so the date on a piece of evidence matters as much as its mark.
What the pages leave out
Few Paris clubs publish their membership fee, and fewer still say outright whether a visitor may sit down for a game on a club evening. Where no page gives an answer, the entry reads "not stated by sources"; a blank never stands for no.
If you know a page that fills one of these gaps, send it through the form. It is checked and added, with its date, at the next revision of the directory.
What is not assessed
- Clubs, cafés, schools, coaches and tournaments get no grade, no score and no place in a ranking.
- Every entry rests on published pages; no one visits the halls for the directory.
- Membership and entry fees are quoted as their page gave them on the day of reading and are not verified on the spot.
- Timetables follow the school year and the team championships, and can change before the entry is next revised.
- Nobody judges how well a course is taught; a coach's title is only set against the FIDE profile.
- Wheelchair access, the opening hours of a building and similar practical matters are not looked into.
- Turnout is not counted, so an entry cannot tell you how many players come on a given evening.
- An empty field only means that no page answered the question.
If an entry is about you
Club committees, tournament organisers, coaches, café owners and members can correct an entry through the suggestion form. A link to a page that shows the right fact makes the change quick.
Every accepted correction is dated in the directory changes and noted on the entry concerned. A place that prefers not to appear can say so through the same form, and its entry is taken down at the next revision.
Dates and revisions
The pages behind the current entries were read from to . The date beside each source on an entry tells you how old that piece of evidence is.
The whole directory is read again about every 6 months. In between, a club may change its evening or its hall before the entry catches up, and the club's own page then has the last word.
Who runs it
Paris Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organisers, schools, cafés or shops, carries no advertising and has no link with the Fédération Française des Échecs, its regional leagues or any club.
It exists because Parisian chess is scattered across a federation register, a rating list and dozens of club sites and blogs, each holding one piece of the picture. The suggestion form is how players and clubs keep it right between revisions.
Reusing the data
The whole directory can be downloaded as a JSON file, one record per entry with every source, mark and date. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; please name Paris Chess when you reuse it.
For language models and other software, a plain-text summary of Paris Chess is available at llms.txt.
Checked and left out
Entries checked and not listed: 7. The usual reasons are a club outside the area described above, a duplicate of a listed club under a second registration, an event that changes venue every time, or a register entry with no hall, no timetable and no other page.
Map pins
An entry has a pin when a source gives a map position or when its address is found as a building in the OpenStreetMap address search. A pin found by search is marked as approximate. Where an address has no pin, the map button searches for the address instead.
No pin is placed by hand, and the site draws no map of its own. Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).