Editorial method and sources

What is listed

The guide covers Sofia and the towns around it where chess is played or taught: clubs, recurring cups and festivals, halls that host events again and again, and anything else with a name and a page that shows chess there. A school, mall or hotel that hosted a single tournament is left out, as is a one-off corporate cup.

Nothing here is scored, ranked or recommended, and no listing is paid for. Each list starts with the place whose pages show chess most recently.

Where the facts come from

The Bulgarian federation’s main site could not be reached when the cards were made, and its newest public list of member clubs dates from 2021. Most facts therefore come from the public tournament server chess-results.com, read for Sofia and Pernik from 2025 to 2027: each row of its search names the organiser and the venue. The Bulgarian Chess League’s site, the federation’s news page and a university sports page add the rest.

A club known only from the 2021 list stays unconfirmed until a later dated page shows it at work. Each fact ends in a small number that leads to its source, with a short quote in the original language and the day the page was read.

Official, secondary, unverified

Official means the page belongs to the place, its organiser, the federation or a public body. Secondary means someone else reports it: the tournament server, a directory, a newspaper. Unverified means the fact was posted by users or seen in a single place only.

The mark tells who is speaking, not whether they are right: a tournament row can carry an old venue, and a club’s own page can fall behind its practice.

What the cards leave open

Hardly any Sofia club prints when it meets, what a visit costs or whether a newcomer may simply drop in. Where no page says, the card shows “not stated by sources” instead of a guess drawn from the kind of place.

If you can point to a page that answers one of these questions, send it through the form, and the fact will be added with that page as its source.

What the guide does not judge

• No club, hall, coach or event is given a mark, a grade or a rank.
• Every card rests on published pages; nobody visits the halls on behalf of the guide.
• Entry fees are copied from the page that states them and not confirmed with the organiser.
• Days and times are taken from published notices and may change before the card does.
• The strength of a club or the level of its teaching is not assessed.
• Step-free access, heating, light and noise in the halls are not checked.
• The number of players who turn up on a given day is not counted.
• An empty line means no page answers it; it never means the answer is no.

If a card is about you

Club officials, organisers, coaches, parents and players can correct any card through the form. A link to the page that shows the right information makes a change quick to confirm. Messages are read together at the next revision.

Each change is dated in the revision history and noted on the card it concerns. A club that would rather not be listed can ask for that through the same form and give its reason.

When the pages were read, and what comes next

The pages behind the current cards were read between 15 October 2026 and 15 October 2026. The date next to each source shows how fresh that particular fact is.

The whole guide is meant to be read again about every 6 months. In between, a cup may change halls or a club may stop playing without the card following at once. Every revision of the data or of these rules goes into the revision history, newest first, and earlier entries are left as they were written.

Who runs it

Chess in Sofia is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organisers or halls, carries no advertising, and nobody pays either to appear or to be removed.

It exists because chess in Sofia is spread across federation lists, league pages and hundreds of tournament rows, each with a single name and a single date. Read together they show where the game is alive, and this guide keeps that reading in one place with its sources.

Reusing the data

The whole guide can be downloaded as a JSON dataset: one record for each place, with all its sources, marks and dates. The licence is stated inside the file.

Software and language models can read a plain-text outline of the guide at llms.txt.

Checked and not listed

Leads checked and left out: 17. Usual reasons are a hotel, mall or school that hosted a single tournament, a corporate cup played once, an online-only club, or a club whose only activity lies outside the Sofia area. The dataset gives every lead with its reason.

Pins on the map

A card gets a pin only when a source gives one or when the OpenStreetMap address search finds the building itself. Few Sofia sources print a full street address, and many give a residential complex and block instead, so most cards have no pin.

No pin is set by hand. The site has no map of its own: the map button opens openstreetmap.org, and pins from OpenStreetMap are credited on the card.