How the listings are verified
Bielefeld Chess lists chess clubs, open meetings, tournaments, courses and school chess in Bielefeld and the Gütersloh, Herford, Höxter, Lippe, Minden-Lübbecke and Paderborn counties. This page answers the questions behind every entry: which area is covered, what an entry rests on and what its marks mean.
Which area does the site cover?
The site is named after Bielefeld, the largest city of the region, but covers the whole of Ostwestfalen-Lippe, the government district of Detmold: the city of Bielefeld and the counties of Gütersloh, Herford, Höxter, Lippe, Minden-Lübbecke and Paderborn. Each entry names its town, from Petershagen and Minden in the north to Höxter and Beverungen on the Weser in the south-east.
Münster, the Sauerland, the Ruhr and Lower Saxony lie outside it, even where a club of the area plays a league match there. No entry is graded, and none is paid for.
What does an entry rest on?
Clubs start from the schach.in register and from the league portal of the Schachverband Ostwestfalen-Lippe, which dates every match; each club's own pages add the playing room, the evening and the youth hour. Named tournaments come from the FIDE list of rated events and from the organisers' pages.
Open meetings, courses and school chess come from the pages of libraries, parishes, associations, adult-education centres, the university sports programme and the schools themselves, from the result tables of the state’s school chess portal, and from city calendars and the regional press where those pages point to them.
Every fact ends in a small number that leads to its source: a short quotation in the language of the page, the day it was read and one of three marks. Nobody visited the rooms; everything here can be checked by opening the page.
What do the three marks mean?
Official: the club, school, organiser, meeting place or a federation published it. Secondary: someone else reported it, such as a league portal, a newspaper or an event calendar. Unverified: it rests on a user post or a single passing mention.
A mark tells who is speaking, not whether the page is right. A register line shows only that a club exists; an entry needs a dated trace, such as a league match, a tournament report or a timetable for the current season, to read as confirmed.
What do the pages rarely say?
Club evenings and league matches are easy to find in Ostwestfalen-Lippe; membership fees, whether boards and clocks are provided and whether a visitor may simply come along are written down far less often. Where no page says it, the entry says so instead of guessing.
Anyone with a page that answers one of these questions can send it through the form; it is read and dated at the next revision.
What does the site not judge?
- No club, meeting, course or tournament is rated or ranked.
- Nobody visited the venues; every fact comes from a page anyone can open.
- Fees appear as the pages gave them on the day they were read.
- Club evenings and school groups change with the season and the school year.
- Teaching is not judged; a stated title is only compared with the FIDE database.
- Nobody checked step-free access, parking or what the rooms are like.
- How full an evening gets cannot be read from any page, so no entry says it.
- A register line alone proves little; only a dated page shows a club still plays.
Are you listed here?
Clubs, schools, parishes, associations, organisers, trainers, parents and players can correct any entry through the form. A link to a page that shows the right detail is enough; the entry changes once that page has been read.
Accepted corrections are dated in the update log and shown on the entry itself. A place that does not want to be listed can say so through the same form.
When were the pages read?
The pages behind the entries now online were opened between and ; each source shows its own reading day.
The whole area is collected again about every 6 months. Between two rounds a club may change its room or a school its chess group; the form is the way to tell the site.
Who runs the site?
Bielefeld Chess is an independent editorial project. No place pays to appear, there is no advertising, and the site has no tie to the Schachbund Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Schachverband Ostwestfalen-Lippe or any club.
It exists because chess in the region is spread over a league portal, club sites, parish newsletters, school pages and course programmes, and a player who has just moved to Paderborn or Minden should not have to read them all.
Can the data be reused?
The whole list is published as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with every source, mark and date, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.
For language models and other software there is a plain-text summary at llms.txt.
What was looked at and left out?
Candidates checked and not listed: 52. Most are clubs or school groups whose pages carry no recent date, clubs that merged or left the federation, places that hosted chess only once, and series that belong to a club already listed.
How are map points placed?
A map point appears only where the entry's address matched a building in the OpenStreetMap address search or a source page gives one; it is marked as approximate.
No point is set by hand and the site draws no map of its own. Map data belong to the OpenStreetMap contributors and are shared under the Open Database License.