How we work
Chess in Hanoi gathers the academies, tournament series, clubs, cafés and player communities of Hà Nội in one place, and ties each fact to a page anyone can open.
What is covered
The listing covers the whole city of Hà Nội, the outer towns and communes included: Sơn Tây, Hà Đông, Gia Lâm and Đoài Phương belong to it as much as Hoàn Kiếm. A card needs a name that can be checked and at least one page that shows chess there. Xiangqi and the board game Cờ Doanh Nhân are common in the city’s tournament listings and are left out.
Nothing here is scored, ranked or recommended, and no card is paid for. Inside each list the place with the most recent dated sign of chess comes first.
Which pages are read
Vietnam’s chess federation publishes no register of Hà Nội clubs, and most small clubs live on Facebook and Zalo, which cannot be read the way a public page can. The main record is therefore the public tournament server chess-results.com, read month by month for 2025 to 2027. For a club known only there, the card gives the organiser name, the venue line and the newest dated tournament.
The FIDE rated-tournament list, the federation’s own notices, the academies’ websites and a directory of teaching centres fill in the rest. Every fact on a card ends in a small number that leads to the page stating it, with a short quote in the original language and the day it was opened.
Each card names the former district (quận, huyện or town) that its pages print, such as Đống Đa or Sơn Tây. Vietnam removed that level in July 2025 and the pages mix old district names with new ward names; a card whose pages name no district simply reads Hanoi.
Three marks on a source
A source is marked official when it comes from the place itself, its organiser or a chess body; secondary when a third party reports it, such as the tournament server or the press; unverified when it was posted by users or found in a single place only.
The mark says who is speaking, not whether they are right. A tournament row can carry an old venue, and an academy’s site can lag behind its branches.
What no page states stays empty
Very few clubs in Hà Nội publish their playing days, their fees or whether a visitor can sit down without signing up. Where nothing answers the question, the card says “not stated by sources” instead of guessing from the kind of place.
If you know 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 listing does not judge
- No academy, club, café, coach or tournament gets a score, a grade or a position in a ranking.
- Cards rest on published pages only; nobody visits a club room or a class on the project’s behalf.
- Fees are copied as a page prints them and are not confirmed with the academy.
- Days and hours come from organisers and can change before the card does.
- Teaching quality is not assessed; a teacher’s title is checked only against a linked FIDE profile.
- Step-free access, noise, air conditioning and lighting are not checked.
- How many people turn up on a given day is not counted.
- A blank line on a card means no page answers it, never that the answer is no.
If a card is about you
Academy owners, club officers, organisers, teachers and players can correct a card through the form. A link to the page that shows the right information makes the change quick to confirm. Messages are read together at the next revision.
Each correction is dated in the edit record and shown on the card it concerns. An academy or club that prefers not to be listed can ask for that through the same form and say why.
When pages were read, and revisions
The pages behind the present cards were opened between and . The date beside each source on a card tells you how old that fact is.
The whole listing is due to be read again roughly every 6 months. In between, an academy can open a branch or a club can move rooms without its card following. Each revision of the data or of these rules goes into the edit record, newest first, and older entries are left as they were written.
Who runs it
Chess in Hanoi is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from academies, clubs, cafés or organisers, carries no advertising, and nobody pays to be listed or to be removed.
It exists because the city’s chess is spread across thousands of tournament rows, each holding one name, one venue and one date. Read together, they show where the game actually lives; this site keeps that reading in one place with its sources.
Reusing the data
The whole listing can be downloaded as a JSON dataset: one record per place, with every source, mark and date. The licence is stated inside the file.
A plain-text outline of the site for language models and other software sits at llms.txt.
Examined and left out
Leads looked at and not listed: 23. Usual reasons are a hall or school that hosted a single tournament, a xiangqi or Cờ Doanh Nhân event, a place in another province with a Hà Nội street name, or a name that could not be tied to a place. The dataset names each lead with its reason.
Map pins
A card shows a pin only when a source gives one or when the OpenStreetMap address search finds the building itself. Many Hà Nội addresses sit in lanes and apartment towers that the search cannot match, so most cards here have no pin.
No pin is placed 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.