One year ago my Carballo Chess Engine (https://github.com/albertoruibal/carballo) was stuck: all the improvements that I was trying were not working, and I detected the main problem: I am a poor chess player so I will never be a good chess engine developer. I thought that the main chess programming skill was statistical analysis and not chess knowledge, but I was wrong.

So, I took the decision of starting to learn and play chess. I joined the local chess club Xadrez Ramiro Sabell (http://www.xadrezramirosabell.com) and I was so lucky that in this club teaches chess the International Master Yudania Hernández Estevez. It’s quite curious the amazing people that you can find in a small city like Ponteareas. I also try to help the club in the tournaments organization and with a small Mobialia sponsorship. Now I am playing the Galician Chess League (in third division) and all the tournaments that I can.

My chess level is improving fast (ok, I’m under 1600 ELO yet: http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=24597015), but the real deal is that the Carballo Chess Engine strength is improving much faster, climbing positions in the CCRL list (http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/). Learning chess helps me to diagnose the flaws and to understand better what’s going on under the hood.

Finally,  playing chess also helps me to detect the chess player needs, so I realized the main missing feature from Mobialia Chess: a chess database to review historic games and to analyze your own games searching statistics for each position. This year I worked to implement this feature and starting today you can access a Beta version of the database in Mobialia Chess Web (http://chess.mobialia.com).