ChessBase, Kostya Kavutskiy, and the Gap the Chess Content Market Lives On

There is a moment that anyone who has ever sat beside a club player recognizes. Your student knows fifteen lines of the Najdorf Defence by heart, recalls the exact ninth move of the Sveshnikov system, yet by move twenty-five sits motionless. Their eyes rest on the empty space between the two flanks, not because they are stuck for a move, but because they do not know what to calculate next. No piece is hanging, no clear forcing line exists, and the position is so balanced it feels hollow. I have sat in silence for a long time in front of positions like that, and I learned that silence is not paralysis. It is a state in which, if you are patient enough, you begin to see the faint connections between the pieces, the diagonals no one has drawn yet.

Sometimes, to understand a position, you have to stand in silence longer than others can bear. That hollow moment is the gap an entire chess-content industry lives on. And that is why I read ChessBase's announcement about two new courses by Kostya Kavutskiy with more attention than people usually give a product notice.

People say girls know nothing about tactics. So I write for them to read.

ChessBase is not a newspaper. It is a German software company, founded in 2026 in Hamburg by Frederic Friedel and Matthias Wüllenweber, known first for its game database and the Fritz engine. But the product line that has delivered steady revenue for nearly two decades is FritzTrainer — a series of video and training-software courses, each tied to the name of a specific author. The way this line works is simple: a respected player sits at the board, moving pieces and explaining, and the buyer pays to acquire some part of that person's way of thinking. The buyer does not purchase pieces or a board. They purchase a voice.

On 9 December 2026, ChessBase announced two new FritzTrainer courses by the same author: Kostya Kavutskiy. The first is titled “Mastering Calculation.” The second is titled “The Fundamentals of Positional Play.” Kavutskiy is introduced as an International Master, a FIDE-certified trainer, and an author already known in the content market. He is introduced not by an Elo figure, not by a tournament result, but by three initials and a professional title.

The announcement comes with a review by Jochen Schwarz, a club player described as a connoisseur. Schwarz places Kavutskiy's two courses beside two authors already established on the same platform: Robert Ris and Ivan Sokolov. That framing is worth noting. A new course is not judged against an abstract standard, but against two names that already hold a place in the catalogue. Ris is a Dutch author with a vast catalogue on openings and middlegame skill. Sokolov is a Grandmaster of Bosnian origin, also a familiar name in courses on structure and positional play. Placing a newcomer beside two veterans is a deliberate act, not an accident.

A note on the date is needed, because I am someone who always demands evidence before believing. The string “9/12/2026” carries two readings: in the American style, 12 September 2026; in the European style, 9 December 2026. For a product announcement, this ambiguity does not change the substance of the story, but it reminds me that even a date needs to be read correctly before it is cited. I leave that detail there, as a margin note for the careful reader.

The first thing to state clearly: this is not the story of a game. There is no move, no position, no move-quality metric anywhere in the announcement. A reader used to match analyses will find it barren, even disappointing. But read as market data, the story becomes far clearer, and far more worth dissecting.

Who are these two courses aimed at? The titles already answer. “Fundamentals” is a word for beginners and club players. “Mastering Calculation” is the skill every player below master level feels they lack. Calculation and positional play are the two pillars of general chess skill. They are also the most crowded, most saturated categories in the instructional-content market. That is the crux: ChessBase is not selling new chess knowledge; it is selling a way of conveying it. Knowledge of calculation and positional play lies scattered everywhere, free, from old books to online video. What is not free is the feeling of being guided by a specific person, of hearing that person think out loud in real time.

Let me be more concrete about the academic content, because this is where I want readers to see the logic at work. Teaching calculation is not teaching memorized combinations. Real calculation involves four tasks: visualizing the position in your head without looking at the board, listing candidate moves, pruning the tree of variations so you do not drown in hundreds of branches, and recognizing your own blind spots. A good calculation course does not hand out ten thousand puzzles. It teaches the learner to ask the right question before every move. That is why courses of this kind typically use study positions and forced sequences, where only one path is correct and every other branch is refuted by logic rather than intuition.

Teaching positional play is a different story. The fundamentals of positional play revolve around pawn structure, weak squares, outposts, and the concept of prophylaxis that Nimzowitsch systematized nearly a century ago. The learner must understand that a piece's value lies not only in its point count, but in the number of squares it controls and the quality of those squares. There are positions where a Knight on the rim is stronger than a Rook, and positions where an isolated pawn is a deadly burden. Teaching this is not hard because the knowledge is scarce. It is hard because the gap between knowing and doing is enormous.

Here I want to tell a story of my own. In 2026, when I was sixteen and still a student in Hanoi, I wrote my first analysis on a football forum. It dissected a youth team's formation, and within a single night I received more than forty comments, most of them dismissive. “Girls know nothing about tactics.” I cried, then told myself that if I was right, I had to prove it with data, not with emotion. I tell this not to talk about myself, but because it connects directly to Kavutskiy's story. Both of us are selling something that is not on the board: personal credibility. The difference is that he already has it, while I had to build it from zero, one number at a time.

Based on my experience following matches and training products, a course succeeds only when the buyer trusts the teacher. Not trusts the title, but trusts the voice, the way the person falls silent before a difficult position, the way the person admits that they too once played this move wrong. That is something that cannot be neatly packaged into a product description. It only reveals itself after a few hours of watching, when the teacher runs out of script and begins to speak honestly.

And this is where the story opens its second layer, the one I care about most. Kavutskiy's appearance on ChessBase is a signal of personnel movement between platforms. He is well known in the chess-content ecosystem, tied to community coaching projects and to the rival's larger platforms. His signing with ChessBase resembles a player leaving a big club to join a side trying to rebuild its attack. ChessBase is buying not only content but an audience attached to that name. This is the move of the creator economy, where value lies in the person, not the product.

The competitive context should be stated plainly. ChessBase competes with Chess.com and Chessable — platforms with far larger author bases. Chessable was founded in 2026 and later came under Chess.com, with a model that turns opening study into a gamified repetition with rewards, encouraging learners to return daily. In that game, ChessBase's steady signing of new authors is a way to keep users inside its own ecosystem. One good course is not enough to retain people. A chain of good courses is, and a magnetic name is what makes someone open their wallet a second time.

But a paradox sits inside the review's framing. Schwarz compares Kavutskiy with Ris and Sokolov. Both Ris and Sokolov are authors with massive catalogues on ChessBase itself, and both have worked on openings, calculation, and positional play. When you place a new author beside two old ones in the same category, you are telling the buyer that these are substitutes for one another. That is a double-edged sword. It asserts that the newcomer is of equal standing, but it also admits that the platform is competing with itself.

I have spent many evenings rewatching games with the sound off, just to observe the movement of pieces and the gaps they leave behind. That habit taught me that most of the value lies in what is not said. In this announcement, what is not said is the pressure of renewal. A platform signs a new author not because the old authors have lost value, but because the market wants a fresh feeling. Freshness is a commodity with a short shelf life, and the platform that understands this earliest keeps its learners longest.

And here I must use the eye of someone once measured by the wrong ruler. An entire industry measures a course's worth by its author's title. International Master, FIDE trainer, renowned author. Those three labels are used as currency. But a chess title measures playing strength, not teaching ability. An International Master can be a worse teacher than a 2026-rated player who knows how to ask the right question. The industry knows this, yet still uses titles to sell, because a title is the easiest signal for a hurried buyer to read.

In chess, the FIDE title has a specific history. FIDE is the international chess federation, and its title system — from National Master, FIDE Master, and International Master to Grandmaster — was built to tier competitive strength. The FIDE trainer title came later, as a way to recognize coaching ability. The fact that a product announcement uses the FIDE trainer title as a highlight shows the market has shifted from selling strength to selling the ability to convey. That is a shift worth noting, but it is also a shift that makes titles blurrier in the buyer's eyes. When everyone has a label, the label no longer distinguishes anyone.

The geometry of the board, in this case, is not on the sixty-four squares. It lies in how platforms arrange people side by side, in the gaps between categories, in the diagonals connecting author to audience. If you draw it, you see a triangle: the platform at one vertex, the author at the second, and the author's own audience at the third. The value of this deal lies on the edge connecting author and audience — the edge the platform wants to capture, and the edge it may not hold if the author leaves.

If I were tasked with verifying the quality of these two courses, I would not read the product description. I would set out a checklist. First, do the total runtime and exercise count match up, or is it a short course inflated in marketing. Second, does the author present reasoning before revealing the answer, since that is the line between teaching thinking and teaching answers. Third, are the positions engine-checked, to avoid technical errors that learners will reproduce verbatim. Fourth, is there a clear progression, from easy to hard, or is it a loose collection of lectures. And fifth, is there community support or feedback, because that is what free content cannot provide.

For chess players in Vietnam, this story has another layer that international outlets usually skip. A ChessBase course is priced in euros, and for most club players at home, that is no small expense. That means the product genuinely competes with free channels, with unofficial translations, and with the habit of learning through community. I do not judge that habit. I simply note that price is part of the analysis, and anyone discussing content strategy while ignoring price is omitting an important variable.

But if I stopped there, I would miss the most important thing. People look at a product announcement and worry about the rival. I worry about the catalogue itself. The biggest risk to these two courses does not come from Chess.com or Chessable. It comes from the other courses on the same shelf. When you have Ris, Sokolov, and now Kavutskiy, all selling calculation and positional play, the buyer will not buy all three. They will choose one. A platform slicing its own pie is a quiet risk, rarely discussed, and it appears in no marketing chart.

The second risk comes from outside the industry, and it is larger than the other two. Instructional content is being commoditized. As analysis tools grow smarter and free content grows more abundant, a paid course must answer a question: why should I pay for what I could find myself? The plausible answer lies in what cannot be digitized: companionship, feedback, certification, and the sense of belonging to a learning community. If a course is only video, it is competing with an endless supply of free content, and that competition does not favour the seller.

And here is the final counter-intuitive point, about the review itself. The announcement is published as “Part 2.” A multi-part review series of the platform's own products, published by that platform, is a form of soft marketing. The reviewer is described as independent, and that may well be true. But the line between review and advertising in the content industry is thin, and readers should know where they stand. Tactics never lie; only the reader misreads them.

So what will tell me these two courses are genuinely valuable? Not first-week sales, not praise online. It will be whether, six months later, someone recounts that thanks to the course they saw a move they once overlooked. A single move can be the answer to every doubt. As for the bigger story — the contest between platforms for those who teach chess — I will wait to see whether ChessBase signs anyone else in the next two quarters. If it does, this is not a single announcement but a shift beginning. If it does not, this is just a course, and a course does not make a shift. I will sit in silence and watch, as I always do, and wait for the next move.