Sources and checks behind every card
Porto Chess is a directory of over-the-board chess in Porto and its metropolitan area. Here is how a card gets its facts, how to read the two status lines and the flags, and what the directory leaves alone.
What the directory covers
It lists tournaments and tournament series, clubs, academies, school and university clubs, and a few groups and venues where chess has been played, in Porto and in the municipalities of the Área Metropolitana do Porto, from Maia, Matosinhos and Vila Nova de Gaia out to Paredes, Santo Tirso and São João da Madeira. The aim is a practical one: to let a player see what exists, where it is and how fresh the last sign of activity is.
Nothing here is scored, compared or recommended, and no place pays to appear or to appear earlier. Lists are ordered by evidence alone: chess that is confirmed or announced first, unconfirmed chess after it, and within each group the most recently dated evidence first.
How a card is put together
For Porto the richest sources were a club blog with dated reports and rule sheets, an academy website, the federation's list of clubs, the chess-results tournament database and the FIDE tournament list, with council news and event listings beside them. A card states only what one of those pages says. Each fact points to its page, with the date the page was read and a few words quoted in the original language.
The status has two lines. The venue line tells whether the place itself is open, closed or unknown. The chess line gives the date of the latest dated sign of chess there, such as a tournament held, a report published or a session listed. When that date is still ahead, the line reads “announced for”, since an announced event has not yet been played.
Some facts come from a tournament search whose results cannot be linked one by one; in that case the card cites the search page and quotes the row. Where a club is matched to its tournaments only by an abbreviation, the card says so.
The three source flags
Each source is flagged. Official means the place, its organiser or its federation published the page. Secondary means somebody else did: a tournament database, a newspaper, a directory. Unverified marks user-posted material and claims that no second page supports.
The flag tells you who is speaking, not whether they are right. A federation list can keep a club that stopped meeting, and a tournament database entry can be the freshest proof that a club is alive. Weigh the flag and the date together.
Why so many facts read “not stated”
Clubs around Porto publish little about themselves: several have no page of their own, and access rules, fees and weekly hours are rarely written down anywhere. When no page states a fact, the card reads “not stated by sources”. It does not mean the answer is no, or that the club is closed to visitors; it means nobody wrote it where we could read it. No gap is ever filled with a typical value.
If you know one of these missing facts and can show a page that carries it, send it through the form and it will be added, with its date, in the next round of updates.
What is not measured
- No place, club, coach or tournament is rated, scored or put in an order of merit.
- Nobody from the directory visits the places; a card rests on published pages only.
- Entry fees and prices are copied as a source printed them on the day it was read, and are not verified at the door.
- Dates, hours and time controls belong to the organisers and may change after we read them.
- The quality of teaching is not judged, and a coach's stated title is compared only with the FIDE profile.
- Safety, step-free access, parking and other facilities are not checked.
- Attendance is not counted; player numbers appear only when a source reports them.
- An empty field records that the sources are silent, nothing more.
If the card is about you
Clubs, organisers, schools and players can answer any card through the correction form. Say what is wrong or missing and, if possible, give the page where the correct fact is published. Messages are gathered and checked against that page when the Porto list is next updated; nobody from the directory writes to a listed place first.
Every change is entered with its date under what changed, and a correction to one place is repeated on its card. A place that prefers not to be listed can ask for that through the same form, giving the reason.
Dates and the update cycle
The pages behind the present data were read from to . Every source on a card carries its own reading date, so the age of each fact can be seen without guessing.
The whole list is read again roughly every 6 months. In between, a club may move or a series may end without the card knowing. Changes to the data and to these rules are logged newest first, and a published log entry is never altered afterwards.
Who is behind it
Porto Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no sponsorship, sells no placement and has no link to any club, association, federation, academy or shop in the area.
It exists because the chess of this region is spread over club blogs, tournament servers and federation lists that a newcomer does not know how to search. The form on this site is the only channel for reaching the project; no personal address is published.
The data file
Everything on the cards is also available as one JSON file, a record per listing with all of its sources, flags and reading dates. The licence is written inside the file.
Software and language models can start from llms.txt, a plain-text outline that links every page.
Candidates that were not listed
Looked at and left out: 20. Reasons include draughts events filed among chess tournaments, tutor marketplaces that name no teacher or place, a district association without a venue, events folded into the card of their organiser, and towns beyond the metropolitan area such as Amarante, Penafiel and Chaves. Each one is named in the data file with its reason.
Map points
No Porto source supplied coordinates. Where a card has an address, it is looked up in the OpenStreetMap geocoder and the resulting point is labelled approximate: expect the right street, not always the right door. A card without an address has no point at all.
Points are never set by hand, map links lead to openstreetmap.org, and these pages load no map tiles. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL).