Chess Hotspot

https://chesshotspot.com

Just wanna have all the chess clubs/parks in one place so I can search them and easily find games in new places.

1. Create file .env.local containing NEXT_PUBLIC_MAP_STYLE=https://basemaps.cartocdn.com/gl/voyager-gl-style/style.json

2. pnpm dev

Future: self-hosted map tiles

If Carto CDN tile loading becomes too slow at scale, switch to self-hosted PMTiles on Cloudflare R2. Host a single .pmtiles basemap file from https://maps.protomaps.com/builds/ on R2 (free egress, ~cents/month storage). Uses pmtiles + @protomaps/basemaps npm packages with MapLibre's addProtocol API. See https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/.

Goal: only show very active spots Continuously verify and remove inactive spots

What does a user want to do? Casual/non-master user wants to play chess and find events near them

• Find active chess clubs in their area

• Filter by day of the week, easily see the times

• Find events near them (not necessarily competitive tournaments)

• Find/filter tournaments near them

  • prize fund
  • strength of the pool (U1800, Open, etc.)
  • location (visible on map)
  • dates/times (can be adjusted with a slider)
  • link to club website
  • picture of tournament hall

TODO:

• Lower PNG resolution sizes

Stretch idea:

• "live hotspots" of where people are playing chess right now, can organize a temporary meetup via the app

• Incentives for contributing

• Leaderboard/karma score. Titles/achievements

• "just steal everything from gacha games"

• Investigate all clubs with no hours?

• "OSM has a specific, official tag for chess: sport=chess. People use this to tag giant outdoor chess boards, permanent park tables, and public chess pavilions. How to get the data: You can use the Overpass API (a tool built for querying OSM data). You can literally write a query that says, "Give me the latitude and longitude of every single location on Earth tagged with sport=chess"

• scrape chess reddit api for chess in the park + city name

• meetup.com

• ChessPlaces.com or the European Chess Union's ChessWhere project.

• https://www.chess-la.com/

• https://sites.google.com/site/louisianachess/chess-club-locations-info

• How to get images for all sites? Seems very time consuming

• Search Bar (I.e. "Denver" boom you're zoomed to denver)

Chess.com postprocessing

Cursor prompt: Each chess club: please identify is it a real club, a meme, etc. Its a big file, i suggest tou find some way to go entry-by-entry

For each club, if it seems to be a real club (member count >1, not a meme, references a real life place), put it in its own file. Like chesscom_postprocessed.json or something. Skip high school and middle school clubs. College clubs are generally open to the public in my expereince, so keep those in.

Event scrapers (Python)

Run:

pnpm events:scrape:py

Output:

public/events.v1.json

Current implementation:

• scripts/events_scrapers/base.py: abstract base + shared event model
• scripts/events_scrapers/cca.py: CCA scraper
  • starts at https://www.chesstour.com/refs.html
  • collects tournament links
  • prefers non-blitz canonical pages (e.g. keeps aco26.htm, drops acob26.htm)
  • parses broad metadata from event pages (dates, schedule, prizes, sections, fees, ratings, contact, full text)

USCF club import & fill (Python)

1. Scrape USCF clubs: python3 scripts/scrape_clubs.py → data/uscf_clubs.json
2. Import into spots: pnpm spots:import:uscf — adds all clubs with blank lat/lng/photo/gmap
3. Fill one by one: pnpm spots:fill — walks through each blank club, prompts for Maps link, image, etc.

The fill script shows USCF context (city, address, email) for each club and:

• Extracts lat/lng from any Google Maps URL you paste
• Generates a standard image filename (/img/{club_id}.{ext}) — just provide the extension
• Automatically picks up where you left off — only shows clubs that still need coordinates