About the method

What is covered

The area is the city of Yerevan, with its administrative districts named wherever a source gives one, and the nearby towns of Abovyan, Masis, Ashtarak and Vagharshapat, also called Ejmiatsin.

Listing costs nothing and nobody can buy a better place. Within a list, the entries with the most recent confirmed chess come first; closed or moved places are kept at the end of the full list.

Where the entries come from

Armenia has no public register of chess clubs: the national federation lists province federations and a rating list without club names. The reference therefore starts from the city of Yerevan's list of sports schools, which names every municipal chess school with an address, and the city's school platform, which describes each of them.

Most dates come from the chess-results tournament server, whose search rows name the organiser and often the hall of each event, and from the FIDE list of rated tournaments for Armenia. The pages of the Chess Academy of Armenia and the federation add calendars and class times. Short Armenian abbreviations used by organisers were matched to the bodies they stand for, and the entries say where a match rests on an abbreviation alone.

Every fact ends in a small number that opens its source: the page, a short quotation in the page's own language, often Armenian, and the day it was consulted. Where two sources disagree, for example on a street address, the entry names both.

Source marks

A source is marked official when it comes from the place itself, its organiser, the city or a federation; secondary when a third party reports it, as a tournament server or a news site does; unverified when it rests on a single mention that nothing else supports.

The mark says who is speaking, not whether they are right. A tournament listed on a server shows that it was entered there, not that every detail of it is accurate.

Gaps that remain

Few Yerevan schools publish class hours or say whether an adult may come along, and almost no page says whether a visitor can simply sit down and play. Where a source is silent, the entry says “not stated by sources”; an empty answer never means no.

Anyone who knows a page that closes a gap can send it through the form. It is compared with the entry and added, with its date, at the next revision.

What the reference does not judge

• No school, coach, hall or tournament is rated, scored or put in order of merit.
• Entries rest on published sources; nobody visits the schools or halls for the reference.
• Costs are reported as a source states them on the day it was consulted.
• Class days follow the school year and may change before an entry does.
• Teaching quality is not assessed; a coach's title is only compared with the FIDE profile.
• Access for wheelchairs, heating and parking are not looked into.
• Nobody counts players, so an entry cannot say how full a class or a hall is.
• A tournament on the server shows that it was entered there, not that it took place as planned.

If an entry is about you

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

Every accepted correction is dated in what changed and when and noted on the entry itself. A school, club or person who would rather not be listed can say so through the same form, and the entry is taken down at the next revision.

Dates and revisions

The sources behind the current entries were consulted from 15 October 2026 to 15 October 2026. The date next to each source shows how old that piece of evidence is.

The whole reference is gone through again about every 6 months. Between revisions a school may change its building or its timetable before the entry catches up, and the school's own page then has the last word.

Who is behind it

Yerevan Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from schools, clubs, organisers or venues, shows no advertising, and is not connected to the Armenian Chess Federation, the Yerevan Chess Federation or the Chess Academy.

It exists because chess in Yerevan is described in many separate places: a city list, a school platform, a tournament server, federation news and the Academy's calendar, each holding one part. The form lets players, parents and coaches keep the whole picture right between revisions.

Using the data

The full reference can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with every source, mark and date. It is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; please credit Yerevan Chess when you reuse it.

A plain-text outline of the site for language models and other software is available at llms.txt.

Considered and not listed

Leads examined and not listed: 23. Among them are the compulsory chess lessons of Armenian schools, which are a national programme rather than a place, province federations without a seat in the area, one-off tournaments in banks, hotels and offices, board-game pubs whose pages never mention chess, an online-only school, and towns beyond the area.

Map positions

An entry shows a map position only when its address was matched to a building in the OpenStreetMap address search, or when a source gives a position; a position found by search is marked approximate. Yerevan addresses are often printed as a quarter and building number, or in Armenian script only, and none of them could be matched to a building, so the entries currently show no map position.

Positions are never set by hand and the site has no map of its own; the map link opens openstreetmap.org. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.