How the register is kept

The area and what is listed

The register covers the rayons of Baku and the two cities that run into it on the Absheron peninsula, Sumqayıt and Xırdalan. Entries show the rayon wherever a listing prints one; settlements such as Masazır that belong to the Absheron district are outside the area.

A school, club or series is listed when it is named in a page that a reader can open and holds chess there more than once. Nothing is graded, scored or paid for. Within each list the newest dated trace comes first; places that have moved or closed stay at the end of the full list so that an old link still explains itself.

Which pages are read

Baku has no public register of chess clubs: the federation’s club page returns nothing for the city. The entries therefore rest mainly on the chess-results tournament server, where every Azerbaijani event dated 2025 to 2027 was read for its organiser, its location and its title; a school or club is placed in the area when any of its events is.

The federation’s calendar gives the national championships and the open festivals; a state news agency, university pages and the few sites that schools keep themselves fill in the rest. Each fact ends in a small number that leads to its page, with a short quotation in the language of that page and the day it was read.

Some listings disagree, on a street number or the name of a hall. The entry then shows the newest version and says in its notes which listing prints the other.

What the source marks mean

A page is marked official when the school, club, organiser or the federation published it; secondary when someone else reports it, as the tournament server or a news agency does; unverified when it rests on users or on one passing mention.

The mark tells who is speaking, not whether they are right. A tournament listing shows that an event was entered for a date, not that it was played; a listing dated ahead is shown as a date given, and once that day has passed the page marks it as past.

Gaps left open

Few Baku schools and clubs publish a fee, a timetable or an age range, and most have no site at all. Where no page answers, the entry says “not stated by sources”; an empty line never means no.

A page that fills one of these gaps can be sent through the form; it is checked and added with its date at the next revision.

What the register does not judge

• No school, club, coach or tournament receives a grade, a score or a place in a ranking.
• Entries rest on published pages; nobody visits the halls for the register.
• Fees are copied as a listing printed them for one event and may differ for the next.
• The quality of teaching is not assessed, and a coach’s title is only compared with the FIDE profile.
• A tournament listing shows that an event was entered, not how many children took part.
• Step-free access, parking, heating and similar details are not checked.
• Phone numbers are shown as a listing printed them; whether they still answer is not tested.

If an entry concerns you

School directors, club organisers, coaches, parents and players can correct an entry through the form for places and corrections. A link to a page that shows the right information makes the change quick.

Each accepted correction is dated under register edits and noted on the entry. A school, club or person who would rather not be listed can say so through the same form, and the entry is removed at the next revision.

Dates and revisions

The earliest page behind the present entries was read on 15 October 2026, the latest on 15 October 2026. The date beside each source shows how old that piece of evidence is.

The whole register is due to be read again about every 6 months. In between, a school may change its hall or a series its day before the entry follows; the organiser’s own listing has the last word.

Who keeps the register

Chess in Baku is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from schools, academies, clubs, organisers or halls, carries no advertising for them, and has no tie to the Azerbaijan Chess Federation or to any school listed.

It exists because Baku chess is spread over thousands of tournament listings, a federation calendar and a few school pages, each showing one corner of it. The form is how players, parents and coaches can keep it right between revisions.

Reusing the data

The whole register can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with each source, mark and date. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; please name Chess in Baku when you reuse it.

Language models and other programs can read a plain-text outline of the site at llms.txt.

Looked at and left out

Candidates looked at and not listed: 21. Most are schools, courses and workplaces that entered a single tournament, halls that only hosted another organiser’s events, series held in Masazır outside the area, and clubs known only from old encyclopedia or news pages.

Pins on the map

An entry has a pin only when its address was found as a building in the OpenStreetMap address search; such a pin is marked approximate. Most Baku addresses in tournament listings did not resolve to a building, so most entries have no pin.

No pin is placed by hand and the site draws no map of its own: the map link opens openstreetmap.org. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.