How the Mexico City list works

What the list covers

The list covers the alcaldías of Mexico City and the municipalities of the State of Mexico that form one urban area with them, such as Naucalpan de Juárez, Tlalnepantla de Baz, Ecatepec de Morelos, Huixquilucan, Atizapán de Zaragoza, Cuautitlán Izcalli, Tecámac and Valle de Chalco Solidaridad. It is written for someone who has just arrived, a parent choosing a class, a student between lectures, or a player checking whether a club named online still meets.

Nothing is graded or ranked, nobody pays to appear, and no entry is recommended over another. Lists show first the entries whose chess has a dated trace, the freshest first, and after them those still waiting for one.

Where the facts come from

The starting point for clubs is the roster of the Asociación de Clubes de Ajedrez de la Ciudad de México (Acadfac), which names each affiliated club and its president. The records of the international tournament server show which clubs and organisers actually ran events, where and when; the national federation’s pages give its own events and its directory of state associations. School and club sites add timetables and fees, and city press such as Chilango supplies the plazas, gardens and cafés where people play.

Each fact on a card ends in a small number that leads to the page stating it, with a short quotation in the original Spanish and the day the page was consulted. A card carries two status lines. The place line says whether the venue is open, closed or unknown; the chess line gives the date of the newest sign of chess there, and a date still ahead is shown as the date the notice gives, since a notice is not yet a game played.

When pages disagree, for example when a tournament list and a club’s call print different halls, the card shows both and says which page says what.

Three marks on a source

Official means the page comes from the place itself, its organiser, the association or the federation. Secondary means a third party reports it: a newspaper, a city guide, a tournament record uploaded by someone else. Unverified means user-posted material or a claim that appears in one spot only.

The mark tells you who is speaking, not whether they are right. A roster can keep a club that no longer meets, and a magazine article can be the only page placing chess in a garden. Read the mark together with the date beside it.

Gaps stay visible

Many clubs here publish neither fees nor hours, and almost none say in writing whether a visitor may simply sit down. When no page states a fact, the card says “not stated by sources”. That does not mean no, free or closed; it means nobody has written it where it can be read.

A link that fills such a gap is welcome through the form. It goes onto the card, with its date, at the following revision.

What this directory does not assess

• No club, school, teacher or tournament receives a grade, a score or a place in a ranking.
• Nobody from the directory has visited the venues; cards rest on published pages alone.
• Fees are repeated as printed on the day of reading and are not checked on site.
• Hours come from the places’ own pages and can change faster than the cards are revised.
• The quality of teaching is not judged, and a teacher’s title is compared only with the FIDE profile.
• Safety, accessibility, shade, parking and similar practical points are not looked at.
• Turnout is not counted: a card cannot say how many people come on a given day.
• An empty field means the sources are silent, never that the answer is no.

If a card is about you

Club presidents, organisers, teachers, shop owners and players can all correct a card through the send a place form. A link to the page where the right information is published makes the correction quick to confirm. Messages are gathered and handled when the Mexico City list is next revised.

Each correction is entered with its date under recent edits and shown on the card it concerns. A club or venue that would rather not appear can say so, with its reasons, through the same form.

When the pages were read

Each source on a card carries the day its page was consulted, which tells how old that particular fact is; the latest of those readings behind the present cards was on October 14, 2026.

The whole list is meant to be read again about every 6 months. In between, a club may move halls or change its day without the card following. Every revision of the data or of these rules is added to the recent edits page, newest first, and earlier lines stay as written.

Who runs it

Mexico City Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organisers, schools or shops, carries no advertising for them, and belongs to no federation, association or alcaldía.

It exists because the information is spread across a roster, a tournament server, school pages and magazine articles that each show one piece. The form on this site is the way to reach the project; no personal address is published.

Reusing the data

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

A plain-text outline of the site for language models and other programs lives at llms.txt.

Considered and left out

Entries considered and not listed: 15. The usual reasons are an online-only group, a single event with no second edition, an organiser based outside the metro area (around Toluca, for instance), a directory of tutors with no named entity, or a page that could not be opened. The dataset names every one of them with its reason.

Map points

A card shows a map point when a source gives one or when its address is found by the OpenStreetMap address search. A point found by address search is marked approximate, because it can fall a few doors from the real entrance.

Points are never placed by hand, the site draws no map of its own, and the map link opens openstreetmap.org. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License (ODbL).