How the entries are checked

The area

The directory covers the city of Vienna with all of its districts, and the towns of Klosterneuburg, Mödling, Baden, Bad Vöslau and Korneuburg with Bisamberg, whose clubs play in the Viennese club championship or in the leagues of Lower Austria next door. Place names are given in German, as the towns write them; the districts of Vienna appear under their names, such as Josefstadt or Favoriten.

No entry is rated, ranked or paid for, and none is placed ahead of another. In every list the entries with the newest evidence come first; places that have closed or moved stay at the end of the page that lists everything.

Where the facts come from

The starting point is the Wiener Schachverband: its register of clubs, its list of works teams, its two address directories of playing venues and its pages on school chess and other chess offers. The league tables of the Viennese club championship and of the works league date each team's latest match; the FIDE list of rated tournaments dates the opens and series; the calendar of Chess Unlimited names the open meeting points in cafés, bars and community rooms. Club, café and school pages complete the picture.

Behind every fact on an entry sits a small numbered link to its source, which shows a short quotation in the language of that page, usually German, together with the reading date. The prose of an entry only condenses those quotations; it never adds what no page states.

When two pages disagree, for instance the federation register and a club's own site on its club night, the entry gives both and does not pick one in silence.

The three source marks

Official means the page comes from the place, its organiser or a chess body; secondary means someone else reports it, such as a calendar, a listing or a newspaper; unverified means a lone mention or a contribution nobody else confirms.

A mark says who is speaking, not whether they are right. A register line can outlive the club night it describes, so the date of a piece of evidence weighs as much as its mark.

What the pages leave open

Few Viennese clubs print their membership fee, and fewer say plainly whether a stranger may sit down at a club night. Where no page answers, the entry reads "not stated by sources"; an empty field never means no.

Know a page that answers one of these open questions? Send the link through the form; at the next revision it is checked and added with its date.

What is not judged

• No club, café, school, trainer or tournament gets a grade, a score or a place in a ranking.
• Entries rest on published pages; nobody visits the venues for the directory.
• Fees and entry fees are quoted as a page showed them on the day it was read and are not checked on the spot.
• Club nights follow the league season and the school year and can change before an entry is revised.
• The quality of teaching is not assessed; a trainer's title is only compared with the FIDE profile.
• Step-free access, the opening hours of a building and similar practical matters are not examined.
• Attendance is not counted: an entry cannot tell how many players come on a given evening.
• An empty field only means that no page answered the question; it is not a no.

If an entry concerns you

Club boards, organisers, trainers, café and bar staff and players 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 amendments and noted on the entry it concerns. A place that does not wish to be listed can say so through the same form, and its entry is taken down at the next revision.

Dates and revisions

Every page behind the current entries was read between 23 October 2026 and 23 October 2026, and each source on an entry carries its own reading date, so the age of a piece of evidence is always visible.

The whole directory is read again roughly every 6 months. In between, a club may move to another café or weekday before its entry follows; the club's own page has the last word.

Who runs it

Vienna Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organisers, schools, cafés or shops, carries no advertising and has no tie to the Wiener Schachverband, the Austrian chess federation or any club.

It exists because chess in Vienna is spread across a federation register, league tables, a rating list, a calendar of open meeting points and dozens of club pages, each holding one piece. The suggestion form is how players and clubs keep it current between revisions.

Using 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 Vienna Chess when you reuse it.

For language models and other software there is a plain-text outline of Vienna Chess at llms.txt.

Looked at and left out

Places looked at and left out: 10. The usual reasons are a club in a town beyond the area above, a tournament with only one dated edition, an event whose newest trace is more than two years old, or a map mark with no name and no second source.

Map pins

An entry gets 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 labelled approximate. Where an address has no pin, the map button searches for the address instead.

No pin is set by hand, and the site draws no map of its own. Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).