Sources and method

Area and scope

The directory covers every gu of Seoul and the cities of the capital area that Seoul players travel to: Incheon, and in Gyeonggi province Seongnam, Suwon, Bucheon, Goyang, Gimpo, Anyang, Yongin, Gwacheon, Hwaseong, Hanam, Siheung, Gwangmyeong and Namyangju. Places are named by gu in Seoul and by city outside it, with the romanisation the government uses.

No card is graded, ranked or paid for, and only the date of its evidence decides its place in a list. Places that have closed or moved stay at the bottom of the page of all places.

Where the facts come from

Seoul has no public register of chess clubs that can be read page by page, so the cards are put together from several kinds of source: the organiser and venue fields of the Korean events on chess-results.com; a national chess directory that lists meetups with their weekdays and the venues of coming tournaments; the branch maps, notice boards and blogs of the academies; Meetup, Somoim and Daangn group pages; district sports council pages; newspaper and magazine features; and Korean place listings.

Every fact on a card ends in a small number that leads to its source, with a short quotation in the source's language, usually Korean, and the day it was read. The notes on a card retell those quotations and add nothing they do not say.

Where two pages contradict each other, on an address or a date, the card states both rather than choosing one in silence.

Three marks for a source

A source is marked official when it is the place's own page, its organiser's or a chess federation's; secondary when someone else reports it, such as a directory, a blog, a magazine or a place listing; unverified when it rests on a user post or a single mention that no other page repeats.

The mark tells who is speaking, not whether they are right. A branch map can still show a branch that closed, which is why the date of each trace counts as much as its mark.

Gaps stay visible

Most academies around Seoul print neither fees nor class times on a public page, and many meetups announce each meeting separately. Where no page answers a question, the card says "not stated by sources"; a blank never means no.

A page that closes a gap can be sent through the form. It is checked and added, with its date, at the next revision.

What the directory does not judge

• No academy, club, meetup, café or tournament receives a grade, score or rank.
• The cards rest on published pages; nobody visits the places on the directory's behalf.
• Fees are quoted as a page printed them on the day it was read.
• Branches of academy chains open, move and close often, sometimes before a card follows.
• Teaching is not assessed; a coach's title is only compared with the FIDE profile.
• Lifts, ramps, opening hours of buildings and similar details are not checked.
• Attendance is not counted; a card cannot tell how many players turn up.
• A blank field only means that no page answered; it is never a no.

If a card is about you

Academy staff, club and federation officers, meetup hosts, café owners and players can correct a card through the form. A link to a page that shows the right information makes the change quick to confirm.

Each accepted correction is dated under what we changed and shown on the card concerned. A place that would rather not be listed can say so through the same form, and its card is removed at the next revision.

Dates and revisions

Every page behind today's cards was read between 15 October 2026 and 15 October 2026; the date printed next to a source tells how fresh that piece of evidence is.

The whole directory is read again about every 6 months. In between, a meetup can change its café or an academy its address before the card catches up; the place's own page always has the final word.

Who is behind it

Seoul Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from academies, clubs, organisers, cafés or federations, shows no advertising and has no tie to any national or local chess federation.

It exists because chess in Seoul is spread over a tournament server, a chess directory, academy blogs, group apps and district pages, each holding one part of the picture. The form is how players and organisers keep it right between revisions.

Using the data

The whole directory can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per card with every source, mark and date. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; credit Seoul Chess when you reuse it.

Programs that read websites for people, language models among them, will find a short plain-text guide to Seoul Chess at llms.txt.

Looked at and left out

Entries looked at and not listed: 17. The usual reasons are an event already covered by the card of the academy or club that runs it, a hall that hosted a single tournament, a group that plays only online, or a place outside the capital area.

Map pins

A card gets a pin when a source gives a map position or when the OpenStreetMap address search finds its address as a building. Korean addresses rarely match at that level, so most cards around Seoul have an address but no pin, and a pin from the search is marked approximate.

Pins are never set by hand and the site draws no map itself; the map link leads to openstreetmap.org. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.