Put your chess club on the map
Most clubs are invisible to the players who would love them. Here's how to fix that in an afternoon.
Ask a club secretary where new members come from and you will usually get the same answer: someone's friend, or someone who walked past the window. Almost never "they found us online".
That is not a marketing failure. It is a discovery problem. A player moving to a new city has no reliable way to find out that three clubs meet within cycling distance, when they meet, or whether a beginner would be welcome.
What being "on the map" actually means
When your club has a ChessConnect page with a location, it appears on the map for anyone browsing that area — in the app, and on this website, without an account. Your regular club nights appear too, as events with a time and a place.
That is the whole mechanism. A player in your city opens the map, sees a pin two streets away, and turns up on Wednesday.
Setting it up
1. Create the group. Name, a short description, and the address where you actually meet. The address matters more than anything else on the page — it is what makes the pin appear in the right place.
2. Say who the club is for. One honest sentence beats a paragraph of history. "Casual club night, all levels, boards provided" tells a nervous beginner everything they need.
3. Add your regular night as a recurring event. Not as a line in the description — as an event. Events are what show up when someone is looking for something to do this week.
4. Invite your existing members. A club page with members and activity reads as alive. An empty one reads as abandoned.
Two things worth doing properly
Use the real meeting address, not the postal one. Plenty of clubs are registered at a secretary's home address and meet somewhere else entirely. The map shows where the pin is, so put the pin where the boards are.
Keep past events. A club with a visible history of events every week is obviously worth showing up to. One with nothing on the calendar is a gamble.
If you organize more than one thing
Clubs running regular tournaments, multiple sections, or several organizers can upgrade to Pro — recurring events, multiple admins, a verified badge and payment collection for entry fees. There is more detail on the For clubs page.
Either way, the first step is the same: put the pin where the boards are.