Chess in Athens, club by club and week by week
Chess in Athens lives in its clubs. Some are chess clubs pure and simple, others the chess section of a big sports association, and they cover the whole basin: Ampelokipoi, Kypseli, Petralona and Pagkrati in the city, then Piraeus, Peristeri, Kifisia and Cholargos, and out as far as Megara and Lavrio. Most weeks one clubroom or another holds an open rapid, a café in Exarchia plays one every Saturday, and a number of clubs teach children and adult beginners.
Clubs 80
Tournaments 30
Lessons 14
Where to play 111
Chess960 over the board in Attica
Chess960, also announced here as Fischer Random or Freestyle chess, has reached the Athens clubs as an occasional event and not yet as a habit. In the last two seasons five clubs each tried it once: a Freestyle day at ASOP Dias in Petroupoli, a first Freestyle tournament at A.O. Neoi Vyronos, a 960 rapid in Kallithea, a 960 rapid at Kotinos in Kypseli, and a Fischer Random blitz played beside the Nikaia Open. Fields ran from under ten players to about thirty.
No club has a regular Chess960 evening so far, so the notices of these five clubs are the place to watch for a second edition. Between such events the variant, where the pieces behind the pawns start in one of 960 shuffled orders, can be played online at ch960.com.
Chess960, Freestyle and Fischer Random events found in the Athens area:
How to read the entries
An entry is in this guide when it has a name and a page anyone can open: the register of the Hellenic Chess Federation, a notice or a league table on the site of the union of Attica clubs, a tournament listing, a club’s own timetable. Each fact on an entry leads to the page that states it and shows the day that page was opened.
Entries with the newest dated sign of chess come first; the order says nothing about how good a club is. A detail that no page gives is marked “not stated by sources” and left at that. The status lines, the three source labels and the limits of the guide are explained on the page behind the guide.
Is your club’s evening missing?
For many clubs in this guide no page states the days on which the room is open. If you know them, or you see an entry that is out of date or a place that is not here at all, write in and add a link to the page that shows it.