About me
One chess player, making the tools I kept wishing for
Hello. I'm Pascal, and I build ChessRaccoon. I'm a chess enthusiast first and a maker of chess tools second. The second happens mostly because of the first.
I play at SK Oude God in Mortsel, Belgium. Club chess is where you see how much of this game runs on volunteers: someone updates the rating list, someone refreshes a tournament page over and over to see whether board three has finished, someone makes the diagram for the newsletter at eleven at night. Most of that work is small, repetitive, and takes an evening it shouldn't.
So I make tools for the people doing it: players, clubs, coaches and tournament organisers. Each one does a single job properly, runs in the browser, and needs no account to try.
Chess already has plenty of software that tries to do everything. I'd rather ship one tool that does one thing and then gets out of the way. If I can't explain a tool in a single sentence, it isn't finished.
Everything here is built in the evenings, tested on real tournaments, and used first by my own club before it goes out. When something breaks, it's one person fixing it, which is slower than a company, but you also get an actual answer.
Got an idea, a bug, or a job your club does by hand?
Tell me about it. The tools on this site all started as something that annoyed someone at a chessboard.
— Pascal