How the index is checked

What the index covers

It covers the emirate of Dubai with Sharjah and Ajman, which share one urban area with it: academies and clubs that teach or play, social groups that meet regularly, cafés where chess is known to be played, championships that return and the federation that runs the calendar. Abu Dhabi and the other emirates are outside it, and so is a mall or hotel that hosted a single event.

No entry is scored, ranked or recommended, and none is paid for. Lists begin with the entry whose pages show chess most recently.

The pages that were read

The UAE Chess Federation’s register of affiliated clubs gave the established clubs. The public tournament server chess-results.com was searched for every event in the Emirates from 2025 to 2027 and filtered by organiser and venue; the FIDE list of rated events added the rest of the calendar. Academies’ own sites, Meetup pages, a ticketing page, Arabic and English press, and guides published by property portals filled in addresses, prices and hours.

Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram groups, where much of the city’s chess is announced, were not read. Every fact ends in a small number that leads to its source, with a short quotation in the original language and the day the page was read.

Official, secondary, unverified

Official marks a page published by the entry itself, its organiser, the federation or a public body. Secondary marks a page by someone else: the tournament server, a newspaper, a guide, an event platform. Unverified marks a user post or a fact seen in one place only.

A mark says who is speaking, not whether they are right: an academy’s page can describe more than it runs, and a tournament row can keep an old venue.

What stays unknown

Many Dubai pages give no street, no weekly hour, no fee and no word on whether a visitor can sit down and play. Where no page answers, the entry reads “not stated by sources” and does not infer an answer from the kind of place.

A page that answers one of these questions can be sent through the form; the fact is then added with that page as its source.

What the index does not assess

• No academy, club, group, café or event is scored, graded or ranked.
• Entries rest on published pages; no one visits the places for the index.
• Fees are taken from the page that prints them and are not checked with the organiser.
• Days and hours come from published notices and may change before the entry does.
• Neither the quality of the teaching nor the strength of the players is judged.
• Seating, parking, noise and air conditioning are not checked.
• Turnout at meetups and tournaments is not counted.
• A blank field means that no page answers it, never that the answer is no.

If an entry concerns you

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

Every change is dated in the index changes and noted on the entry it concerns. An academy or club that prefers not to be listed can say so through the same form and give its reason.

When pages were read, and what comes next

The pages behind the current entries were read between 15 October 2026 and 15 October 2026. The date beside each source shows how fresh that one fact is.

The whole index is due to be read again roughly every 6 months. In between, a meetup may change café or an academy may close a branch before its entry catches up. Each revision of the data or of these rules goes into the index changes, newest first, and older lines stay as written.

Who runs it

Chess in Dubai is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from academies, clubs, cafés or organisers, carries no advertising, and no one pays to be listed or to be removed.

It exists because chess in Dubai is spread across academy sites, Meetup pages, federation notices and tournament rows, each naming a place and a date and little more. Read together they show where the game is taught and played, and this index keeps that reading in one place with its sources.

Using the data

The whole index can be downloaded as a JSON dataset: one record per entry, with every source, mark and date. The licence is stated in the file.

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

Checked and not listed

Leads checked and not listed: 15. The usual reasons are an academy or club based in Abu Dhabi, a school or mall that hosted one event, a name that no page ties to the area, or a domain that no longer serves a site. The dataset gives each lead with its reason.

Map pins

An entry gets a pin only when a source gives coordinates or when the OpenStreetMap address search finds the building itself. Dubai addresses are usually a tower, a mall or a community number, which the search seldom matches, so most entries have no pin.

No pin is placed by hand. The site draws no map itself: the map button opens openstreetmap.org, and pins taken from OpenStreetMap are credited on the entry.