The method

What it covers

The directory covers the province of Istanbul, on both the European and the Asian side, from Beylikdüzü and Esenyurt to Tuzla and Sarıyer. It is written for a parent looking for a weekend class, a player new to the city who wants a tournament, a visitor who hopes for a game, and anyone checking whether a club named somewhere online is still active.

No entry is rated, paid for or recommended over another. Lists put first the entries with a confirmed or dated sign of chess, newest evidence first, and after them the entries that could not be confirmed.

Where the cards come from

In Istanbul, chess leaves its traces mainly in tournament records. The chess-results server lists the tournament sections played at Istanbul venues, each with its organiser and place; the FIDE list of rated tournaments for Türkiye shows the events that were played for Elo; the Turkish Chess Federation’s Istanbul office announces cups and championships. Academies and clubs are then read on their own sites for branches, classes, hours and fees, and municipal pages fill in the cups they run.

Every fact on a card ends in a small number that leads to the page stating it, with a short quotation in the original language and the day it was read. The venue line says whether the place is open, closed or not known. The chess line gives the date of the newest sign of chess; a date that lies ahead is shown as the date a notice gives, because an announcement is not yet a game.

Where two pages disagree, for example a club site and a tournament listing that give different addresses, the card keeps both and says which page gives which.

Official, secondary, unverified

A source is official when it comes from the place itself, the organiser or a federation body; secondary when someone else reports it, such as a newspaper, a municipality’s news page or a listing; unverified when it is a user’s post or a claim found in one place only.

The mark says who is speaking, not whether they are right. A tournament listing can name a café that has since closed, and a directory review can be the only sign of chess at a place. Read the mark together with the date next to it.

What sources do not say

Many Istanbul clubs publish their tournaments but not their own address, and very few say whether a visitor may simply come and play. Where no page gives a fact, the card says “not stated by sources”. That does not mean no, free or closed; it means nobody has written it down where it can be read.

If you know a page that answers one of these gaps, send it through the form; it will be added to the card, with its date, at the next revision.

What the directory does not assess

• No academy, club, teacher or tournament is graded, scored or ranked.
• Nobody from the directory has visited the venues; every card rests on published pages.
• Fees are copied as published on the day of reading and are not checked with the academy.
• Class hours and tournament dates come from the organisers and may change before a card does.
• Teaching quality is not judged; a teacher’s title is checked only against the FIDE profile.
• Accessibility, safety, transport and parking are not examined.
• Attendance is not counted, so a card cannot say how full a class or a tournament is.
• A blank field means the sources are silent, never that the answer is no.

If a card is about you

Academy directors, club officers, organisers, teachers and players can all correct a card through the report a change form. A link to the page where the correct information appears makes the change quick to confirm. Messages are read together at the next revision of the Istanbul directory.

Each correction is dated in the edit history and shown on the card it concerns. A club or venue that prefers not to be listed can ask for that, with its reasons, through the same form.

Reading dates and revisions

The pages behind the current cards were read up to 14 October 2026. The date beside each source on a card tells you how old that one fact is.

The whole directory is meant to be read again about every 6 months. In between, an academy may move a branch or a club may change halls without the card following at once. Every revision of the data or of these rules is logged in the edit history, newest first, and old entries are never rewritten.

Who runs it

Chess in Istanbul is an independent editorial project. It takes no payment from academies, clubs, organisers, shopping centres or shops, carries no advertising and is not part of any federation or association.

It exists because the information is spread over tournament servers, federation notices and academy sites that each show one piece of the picture. The form on this site is the way to reach the project; no personal address is published.

Reusing the data

The whole directory can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with its sources, marks and dates. The licence is stated inside the file.

A plain-text summary of the site for language models and other software is at llms.txt.

Considered and left out

Entries looked at and not listed: 30. The usual reasons are a single event with no second edition, an online-only community, a venue outside the province, a duplicate of an existing card, or a lead whose only page could not be opened or gave no year. The dataset names each one with its reason.

Map points

A card shows a map point when a source gives one or when the address can be found by the OpenStreetMap address search. Points from that search are marked approximate, since they can land a few buildings from the real door.

Points are never moved by hand; the site has no map of its own, and its map link leads to openstreetmap.org. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License (ODbL).