World Chess Calendar v1.1.0

Hello everyone! Today I'm glad to present the new version of our new website - World Chess Calendar.
The idea behind it is to gather all of the OTB tournaments in the world in one place. If you've ever tried to find some tournaments in your country or, which is even worse, in a foreign country with a different language, you'll know the pain I had when designed this

How does it work?

It's very simple actually. Here's the main screen:

From here, you can either browse a country, click newest/most tournaments country or scroll a bit lower and click one of the available countries.

In any case, you'll end up on the browse page

That's it! You can now filter out what do you want, click on any tournament and get navigated to it's source. For Poland it's mostly local sites such as chessarbiter or chessmanager. For other countries it's oftentimes chess-results. And many-many more, we are constantly working on expanding our source and country lists

How much data is there right now?

As I'm writing this it's 46,815 tournaments in 28 countries. We've recently had a major migration of the backend part, so right now not all of the countries are on scheduled updates. Regularly each country updates 2 times a week: on Monday and on Thursday. As for now, the following countries have the best data and are on scheduled updates:

1. Poland
2. Turkey
3. Ukraine
4. Belarus
5. Russia

Other 23 countries will be up to date as soon as possible, but if you want some particular one, feel free to ask in the comments

Features

So, what does World Chess Calendar has to offer at the time?

1. Search by location, and that incudes country, region and even city. City feature is a new one and I really love it, because now you don't even need to understand what regions, let's say, Poland has, you can go straight to Warsaw or Cracow and find where to play
2. Search by start date
3. Search by game type. By that I mean whether the tournament is in standard, rapid or blitz chess
4. Search by FIDE. Many players only want to play in rated tournaments so it's an essential feature of WCC, because usually you can't know whether it's rated or not unless you deep dive into some PDFs or nested pages

What problems did we face?

Well of course there were many

The first and the main problem is location. Most of the chess tournaments websites, and that includes local ones and also big ones, allow users to input text for it as they wish. No dropdowns with region or city, just type in some local building in which the tournament is held, why not. Thanks for enforcing the country name to be real, at least.

We've put a lot of effort into detecting the region and city from it, but some tournaments do still have unknown region, so that you can still find them by the search region feature. We aim to reduce this even further with the help of Google Maps API. It's paid, so we try to use it not for all the tournaments, but only for those we failed to process earlier

Second problem is FIDE. Not all the sites support some built-in flag for the ratings, oftentimes this information is only accessible in some PDFs attached which we can't parse at this scale. For now we grab the FIDE flag where it's technically possible or mark the tournament rated if it's name mentions FIDE. In the future we plan to refer to the FIDE database itself, which assumingly has all of their rated tournaments in the world. This should solve the problem

What's next?

Oh, we have many features in mind to add to the project, but most importantly, we now lack real user interaction and feedback. Apparently it's not so easy to attract users to some new page nowadays so that's the main focus for now. Apart from that, here are some technical features to come:

1. Number of tournaments in the region/city when you are picking them from the dropdown. Which means, if you have the time range set to 'this week', and when you choose region/city, you'll be able to see right away, how many tournaments are there. This aims to improve user experience and also solve the problem with location. If there many tournaments with 'unknown' location, you'll know that you should visit it and check out. On the other hand, if there are none of those, you too will understand there's no point clicking into it
2. Adding our own tournament page and merging duplicates into one entity. For now, if the tournament is found in multiple source, we simply display all of the version in the list. In the future, those will be merged into one tournament and mention all of the sources to the user. You'll be able to pick yourself which page you want to visit next
3. Adding the interactive map with tournament locations. Alongside the current list view, we plan to introduce the real map with the pins of different tournaments so it's more comfortable to look through for some users
4. Processing more sources and adding more countries. That's an easy one. We'll be expanding our database overtime, especially when we see users count grow

If you like the app and/or want some country added or updated, please let us now in the comments. It's really important for us :)