ChessBase's 25-Year Handshake: When the Seller Writes the Review

On August 14, 2026, I opened my inbox at six in the morning Delhi time, coffee still hot, and saw a headline: "25 years ago – ChessBase news." I read it three times before understanding that it was not a historical milestone but a sales release dressed in anniversary clothes. ChessBase had just launched a new edition of Endgame Academy, an endgame course package authored by Karsten Müller, opening with two themes: "Checkmate" and "Pawn Endgames." The one presenting it was none other than ChessBase itself. The one invited to put it "under the magnifying glass" to confirm its quality was Michael Kotyk, a young chess trainer in Hamburg.

I have a habit of asking a question before believing. The question I ask does not look like a woman's question, but the answers they dodge are never like a man's. Here the question is very simple: if the product is that good, why does the producer have to write a two-thousand-word self-praise piece?

This article is not meant to tear down Karsten Müller. I have followed his endgame columns since the early years of this century, and I will say it plainly: in the endgame world, Müller belongs to the group of writers I actually trust. What I want to dissect is something else — the way an educational chess product is packaged into an anniversary narrative, and the way a personal reputation is used as a substitute for independent evidence. It is a pattern I have seen repeat over twenty years of covering sports, from football to chess.

That empty stadium years ago, I found the tactical diagram lying quietly under the seat instead of the roar of the crowd. In 2026, when the pandemic froze every tournament, I launched the podcast "Tactical Time Machine" to rewind twenty classic games. I learned one thing: when the crowd noise is gone, what remains is structure. A media product is the same. Strip away the cheers, and you will see the sales frame.

Context: how the chess education market changed hands

To judge a sales release, you have to place it in its market. And the chess education market over the past twenty-five years has passed through at least three eras.

The first era was the CD-ROM age. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, if you wanted to study chess seriously, you bought a disc. ChessBase dominated this period with its Fritz Trainer library, in which experts like Müller packaged endgame knowledge into thousands of interactive positions. The "25 years ago" in the headline refers precisely to that milestone — when ChessBase and Müller began a publishing relationship that has lasted to this day. This was an era in which scarcity created value: high-quality content existed in only one place, and people paid because they had no alternative.

The second era was the age of video and online platforms. Over roughly the past fifteen years, Chessable, online learning platforms, and then dedicated YouTube channels turned chess lessons into a mass commodity. A club student today can access hundreds of endgame lectures for free with a single search. Scarcity disappeared. Value shifted from "having content" to "having carefully edited content."

The third era — the one we live in now — is the age of active learning. Learners no longer accept sitting through a forty-minute lecture. They want to place pieces, to try, to fail, to be corrected immediately. In its release, ChessBase wrote that "interactive options have become indispensable in video courses." That is the most honest admission in the whole piece, and it is also a statement that ChessBase itself is chasing a standard set by the market rather than leading it.

Place the three eras side by side, and the picture emerges: a giant of the scarcity era is having to learn how to play in an era of abundance. And when a company has to write two thousand words to celebrate a twenty-five-year relationship with its flagship author, that is not a sign of absolute strength. It is a sign of a brand that needs to anchor itself to something competitors cannot copy: the name of a single man.

Why Karsten Müller is ChessBase's moat

I have to say this for fairness, before dissecting what follows. In the endgame world, Karsten Müller is not a name built by marketing. He built his position through decades of steady analysis, through books, through columns, through technical explanations that both coaches and professional players cite. When an author says that "nobody is better at endgames than Karsten Müller," it is a marketing claim, but it rests on a real foundation.

In today's booming chess content market, specialization is a defensive advantage. A general grandmaster can teach openings, middlegames, endgames, strategy, psychology — but no one will remember him for one specific area. Müller did the opposite. He narrowed down. And because he narrowed down, he became the reference standard for exactly one thing. When you need to check a king-and-pawn position, Müller's name appears in your head before you even open the board.

But specialization is also a ceiling trap. You can only sell to the group already interested in that exact area. No one buys Müller's endgame course to learn the Spanish Opening. So ChessBase had to position this product not as a course but as an initiation rite — a mandatory starting point for anyone serious about chess, at any level. Their choice of "Checkmate" and "Pawn Endgames" as the opening themes is no accident. These are two foundational bricks, and every serious chess learning path must step over them.

This is where I have to acknowledge the good side. Pedagogically, choosing pawns as the starting point is a correct decision. Pawn endgames are the foundation of all other endgame technique. Without understanding pawns, you cannot understand why a correct exchange wins and a wrong exchange draws. And basic checkmate is something many club players think they already know, but only know in theory, not usable in a real position. A program that starts from these two areas shows that thought went into the path, not just into chasing trends.

But — and this is the "but" of someone whose job is to ask questions — that thought about the path is not presented in the piece. The release says this package "kicks off" a series, but does not say how long the series is, how much total exercise material there is, how many chapters, what the interactivity specifically includes. A good course and a thin course can be described by the exact same promotional paragraph. That is the nature of advertising: it sells you a feeling, it does not sell you evidence.

The trap of the seller writing the review

This is the sorest point, and I will speak plainly as I always do on my podcast.

A company cannot be its own witness for its own product. ChessBase presents Müller's course, then invites Michael Kotyk — a young trainer in Hamburg — to act as independent confirmation. This approach is more sophisticated than pure self-praise, because it creates the feeling of external verification. But the question sits there: what relationship does Kotyk have with ChessBase? Is he paid to comment? Is he a partner or collaborator? The release does not answer. And in my twenty years of following product journalism, silence in the face of a simple question always means something.

If Kotyk is an independent trainer with his own voice, inviting him to critique is a good move. If he is a young name introduced by the ChessBase ecosystem itself to sell to the next generation — and "young Hamburg chess trainer" sounds very much like a curated profile rather than a random one — then it is marketing in the clothes of independent review. The chess market, like the football market, is full of "independent experts" whose bank accounts are tied to a supplier.

I have talked to enough young coaches in this trade to recognize a pattern. When money is earned by recommending a product, the blade of criticism sharpens into a dull edge. No one in this industry cuts their own hand to draw blood. A young coach building a distribution partnership, wanting to be invited to the company's webinars, has an incentive to praise. That is not a personal condemnation of him. It is structure.

And when both ends of the article — the seller and the verifier — sit inside the same ecosystem, the reader does not get a review. They get a staged review. I have witnessed this in football for years: magazines printing "tactical analyses" that are in fact content provided by the team's coaching staff to set the narrative. Here, in the chess industry, the mechanism is identical, only the shell differs: an expert in place of a club, a course in place of a match.

The frightening thing about educational marketing is not the lie. It is the half-truth. The course may genuinely be good, Müller may genuinely be the best, the product may genuinely be worth its price — and all of that is still said by the seller for the purpose of selling. That half-truth does not tell you whether the product suits you, whether it justifies the subscription, whether it can teach a player at your level.

If ChessBase were truly confident in the product, it would publish the price, publish the length, offer a trial, and let independent chess forums evaluate it on their own. It did not do that in this piece.

Examining the interactivity claim — the holy object of the active-learning industry

The most important sentence in the release sits in the middle of the article, tidy and unobtrusive: interactive options have become indispensable in video courses, and the new collection includes them.

Let us dissect that sentence. When ChessBase says interactivity is indispensable, what does it mean? It means it acknowledges having left the era of selling passive video discs. But interactivity is a very broad word. Interactivity can mean you have to choose the correct move before seeing the answer — a form of active practice. Interactivity can also mean just a "explain" button that opens a paragraph explaining the position. These are two completely different levels of quality, and the release lumps both into one word.

As someone who has tutored many students and followed different training methods, this is the crucial point. I have seen passive video courses from the 2000s still teach better than many poorly made interactive packages today. When interactivity is low-quality, the student clicks through quickly, does not think, and then deludes themselves that they have learned. Poor interactivity is worse than good video, because it creates the illusion of progress.

So where is the real standard for judging interactivity? I limit myself to four points. First, is the learner forced to commit before seeing the answer — that is, typing the move, not just clicking to view. Second, is there diagnostic feedback — that is, when you are wrong, does it tell you which idea you misunderstood, rather than just marking you wrong. Third, is the exercise volume large enough to memorize patterns, because endgames are fundamentally about learning patterns, and patterns only stick when repeated enough. Fourth, is there a spaced-repetition schedule, because a pawn position learned today that you do not see again for three weeks is useless.

On those four points, the release says nothing. Instead, it says what is easier to say: it emphasizes the presence of interactivity, not the quality. In ten years of following educational product releases, this is the most familiar sign I recognize. When an attribute is presented as a has-it-or-does-not list rather than a quality scale, the quality is usually mid-range.

Placing competitive value: a course besieged on four sides

Let us put this product on the scale. I will not take sides, only lay out the faces.

The first face is brand credibility. ChessBase has an almost unrivaled foundation in the chess software market. Users of Fritz and the company's products are used to a certain interface quality standard. In the premium segment, their brand is a real asset.

The second face is author expertise. Müller, as said, is the reference standard. In endgames, his reputation cannot be replaced by generalist experts. In a market flooded with content, narrow expertise creates real differentiation.

The third face is interactivity. This is the weaker face compared to the first two. By the demand of the active-learning market, interactivity has become a minimum standard, not an advantage. The release's mention of interactivity proves nothing beyond the fact that they have reached the minimum. In sports language, this is the sentence "the team showed up on the field." True, but it says nothing about the result.

The fourth face is price. There is no price in the piece. No price means no value assessment. An endgame course with thirty basic positions at ten dollars is a bargain. The same course at one hundred dollars is a mistake. Without a figure, any judgment is a guess.

The fifth face, and the one I think is the least noticed, is the free competitor. Over twenty-five years, what has worried ChessBase is not other products. What worries them is Lichess — a free platform, with no paywall, with an enormous endgame exercise library available to anyone with internet. Lichess does not need Müller to compile, because the database of positions is endless. What Lichess does not do as well is pedagogy. They have positions, but they do not have a path. And this is exactly where a paid product still has value. Not because positions are rare, but because paths are rare.

I have written in earlier columns that people often buy what they do not need. Club students buy ten-thousand-position collections when their problem is not a shortage of positions. Their problem is not knowing where to start. The real value of a course like this does not lie in the volume of content. No one lacks content in 2026. It lies in the order of presentation. A correct path, from basic checkmates to pawns, from pawns to minor-piece endgames, can take a player from knowing nothing to having a foundation. A position cache without a path only overwhelms the learner, who quits.

So if I score this product only on the release, I give it a moderately high mark. Not higher, because I lack evidence. Not lower, because the author's expertise and the logic of the path are both reasonable. The real question lies elsewhere, and I will say it right now.

The contrarian view: author credibility is not product quality

I will rebut myself, as I always do when I am caught in an error on air. I have dissected this release as an advertisement in the clothes of an article, and I stand by that. But I admit one thing: its being an advertisement does not automatically mean the product is poor. This is where I could be wrong, and I want to be clear.

A good product still needs advertising. And in some cases, ChessBase and Müller's products genuinely deserve every compliment. Müller has never been famous for overblown claims. He is famous for accuracy. If there is one person in this industry I give a high default trust score, it is him. So the right question is not "is this advertisement credible" but "does a good expert guarantee a high-quality interactive course."

This is the biggest blind spot of the current chess learning market. Expertise and medium quality are two different things. An excellent writer of endgame books does not automatically know how to design a good interactive course. Designing a learning experience is a separate profession, requiring different skills, a different skill set, a different team. In online education generally, this is a classic problem: excellent subject-matter experts produce mediocre learning experiences, and no one tells them because their name is too big to be questioned.

I have seen this repeat too many times not to say it. As a host, I have interviewed educational content editors, and the story they tell is always the same. The expert submits great content, but the learner experience is bad. No one dares to edit it for fear of offending the author. The result is a product with good content wrapped in a poor shell.

There is another angle, and it hurts more. In chess, as in football, there is an implicit hierarchy. Those in the spotlight are never judged by the harshest standard. They are judged by the most comfortable standard, because judging them means siding against a legend. And no one wants to do that, including me at times.

But if I stay silent, I betray the very work I have done for forty years. So I say: a person's reputation cannot replace evidence. It lowers the probability of disappointment; it does not eliminate it. It makes me curious; it does not make me believe. And if a chess course fails, it does not fail because the expert was weak. It fails because of something invisible standing between expert and learner, called experience design, and that invisible thing is never mentioned in advertisements.

What will prove who is right

I am not the type to make a judgment and walk away. I always leave a gate for self-verification. These are the signs I will watch in the coming months.

The first sign is price and length. If ChessBase publishes specific figures about chapters, interactive exercises, and price, I can calculate cost per hour and place it beside alternatives. In twenty-five years of work, I have never believed praise without numbers. Numbers are what shut up those who doubt my competence, and they are also what I demand from others.

The second sign is a trial product. If ChessBase shows the first ten interactive exercises, quality reveals itself immediately. The learner will know within thirty seconds whether the interactivity is real or just a fake button. This is the test no promotional paragraph can pass.

The third sign is an independent voice. I will wait for reviews from independent chess forums, from coaches with no distribution relationship with ChessBase, from users who paid with their own money. When a person buys with their own money, the weight of their words is entirely different.

The fourth sign is silence. If three months pass without any independent evaluation, I will assume the less positive case. Silence does not prove badness, but it certainly does not improve trust.

Mistakes are not frightening; bending down to pick up the tape at two in the morning is what makes a forecaster. In this case, the "tape" is the price figure, the trial exercises, the reviews I will collect. I do not predict whether this product succeeds or fails. I predict the speed and extent of the independent evidence that follows. And that is verifiable.

The floor of a mature market

If you look only at one release, you see a product. If you look wider, you see a market maturing. And maturity has its price.

When the chess education market was crude, the seller could introduce himself and the buyer believed. Because there was no other option. When the market was crowded, the seller still introduced himself, but the buyer had learned to verify. That is the great shift. In this phase, the value of a brand no longer lies in what it says about itself. It lies in what others say about it when they are not paid to say it.

In football, I saw this long ago. A club can buy advertising in every newspaper, but it cannot buy the acknowledgment of a rival. The only thing that creates real reputation is the result on the pitch, and that result must be confirmed by someone with no interest in praising it. For an educational product, the pitch is the independent learner communities, and the result is whether the product actually improves playing strength.

This is why I view the release of August 14, 2026, not as news, but as a mirror. It reflects an industry in transformation. Twenty-five years ago, the relationship between ChessBase and Müller began in a world where high-quality chess content was a scarce good. Today, high-quality content is everywhere. What has become scarce is something else: selection, a path, and verifiable trust.

Placed in that context, a package like Endgame Academy has value only if it does one thing the free crowd cannot do: lead a learner along the shortest path from knowing nothing to playing the endgame reliably. If it does that, any price is acceptable. If it is just a beautiful position cache, do not expect anyone to pay while Lichess keeps its doors open for free.

And that is why the real question of this release is not how it talks about Karsten Müller. The real question is whether the product controls the invisible thing standing between expert and learner. The release does not answer that. It only stages a scene so that when the answer comes, people remember that ChessBase and Müller are still there after twenty-five years.

To me, that is a safe move. In chess as in sport, the safe move always has its place. It preserves the base position. But it does not gain meaningful advantage. And if the new edition of Endgame Academy truly wants to open a long series, it will have to prove more than a twenty-five-year anniversary.

The takeaway

An expert at the top of his field, standing beside the oldest platform in the industry, can still produce a course that no one can verify except those two parties themselves. Twenty-five years of partnership explain why we trust the product. It does not replace what we need to know: the invisible thing between expert and learner, the thing every advertisement ignores and every independent test must go find.

Silent applause can kill emotion, but it cannot kill tactics. I will sit and wait for the real applause — from those who spend their own money to check whether this course actually raises their playing strength, or merely raises their position library.