Karsten Müller and 25 Years of the Endgame Academy: When the Final Moves Get Retold

I remember a rainy afternoon in Shanghai. In a small room of a chess club in Jing'an District, a fourteen-year-old boy sat motionless before a chessboard for forty minutes. Only three pieces remained: the white king, a white pawn, and the black king. He did not move. He only looked. The coach stood behind him, also silent. Outside the window, the rain tapped evenly on the tin roof. Finally, the boy pushed the pawn forward one square. The coach nodded. No praise, no applause.

That was the moment I understood that chess is not a game of moves. It is a game of the silences between moves. And within those silences, somewhere in the world, a man named Karsten Müller has been writing about them for twenty-five years.

On August 14, 2026, ChessBase announced a new edition of the Endgame Academy, opening with Karsten Müller's Checkmate & Pawn Endgames course. The product release was framed by a single sentence: twenty-five years ago. It is not simply a piece of marketing. It is a timestamp, a confession, and perhaps a reminder that in the chess world, the memory of fans is far shorter than the memory of games.

I am not writing this to introduce a product. I am writing to ask a different question: what has happened to the art of the endgame over the past twenty-five years, and why do we still need one man to remind us of old truths?

The truth is that while the entire world of chess media spins around super-tournaments, world championship matches, and increasingly cold engine systems, in a quiet corner of the industry, a German man continues to type about games that most audiences consider the most boring part of chess. The final moves. When the board empties. When the clock ticks louder than the sound of a piece being lifted.

I have followed ChessBase products since the early years of this century. Karsten Müller is not a famous grandmaster like other names on the tournament circuit. He never won a world championship. He has no famous counterattack replayed over and over on television. But within professional circles, his name is a guarantee. For decades, his Endgame Corner column on ChessBase and his endgame books have been reference points for coaches, young players, and commentators like me.

When ChessBase writes that nobody understands endgames better than Karsten Müller, it is a marketing line. But it is also true. And that is the interesting part. In a chess education market flooded with courses from grandmasters, where anyone can sell an opening course or a tactics course, narrow specialization has become a form of identity. Müller does not sell fame. He sells patience.

I remember the first time I read one of his endgame books, more than a decade ago, on a night train from Hangzhou to Shanghai. I opened the book, read one chapter on pawn endgames, and realized I could not read quickly. Not because the book was difficult. Because the book did not allow for speed. Every page demanded that I stop, set up a board, and try the moves. That was the first time I understood that endgames cannot be read. Endgames must be practiced.

And that is what this new edition of the Endgame Academy tries to do. Not just video. Not just print. A system of interactivity where the learner is forced to play moves with their own hands, fail, and try again.

Over the past decade, the chess education market has shifted strongly from passive video to interactive exercises. Chessable pioneered the spaced-repetition model, turning grandmaster games into thousands of flashcards. Lichess offers free endgame exercises, designed surprisingly well. YouTube overflows with free endgame lectures, uneven in quality but endlessly abundant.

Against that backdrop, ChessBase releasing an interactive edition of Müller's course is not an innovation. It is a catch-up. But how they catch up is what matters.

ChessBase chose to frame the product through memory. Twenty-five years. They do not talk about features. They do not talk about the number of exercises. They talk about time. And when a software publisher talks about time rather than features, they are selling something else. They are selling trust. They are selling memory.

I once visited a chess training room in Moscow where the walls were covered with photographs of deceased players. On one wall was a picture of a man I did not recognize. I asked the instructor. He said: that was an endgame coach who taught many young players here. He never won anything. He only taught. And years later, his students still remembered him through final moves.

I think about that when I read the ChessBase announcement. In a world where everything is measured in views, followers, and user numbers, one man spending twenty-five years on the most boring part of chess is almost an act of resistance against the times. And sometimes those counter-era acts are what preserve the dignity of an industry.

To properly assess this edition, I sat down with several exercises. The interactive structure lets users play moves directly on a digital board, compare with the answer, and receive feedback. This matters. In endgames, being wrong by one square can change the result entirely. There is no room for ambiguity. An exercise forces you to decide, and the decision is graded immediately.

For young coaches, this is a valuable tool. Michael Kotyk, a young chess trainer from Hamburg, is mentioned as an evaluator of the product. ChessBase putting a young trainer in an evaluator role is no accident. It reflects a strategy: this product targets those who teach chess, not only those who play it. Because coaches are the ones who transmit endgame knowledge to the next generation, and they are the ones who influence whether their students buy.

Across thirty-seven years of watching and writing about chess, I have realized that most young talents fail in endgames, not openings. They can memorize the most complex opening lines with engines. They can play middlegame moves so bold that grandmasters gasp. But when the board shrinks to a few pieces, they make the most basic mistakes. I have seen a young player throw away a winning endgame simply because he did not know the square rule of the king in a pawn endgame.

That is why I consider this product more important than its surface appearance. The endgame is the least discussed part of modern chess, yet the part that most often decides results. Based on my experience watching matches at youth tournaments in Asia, more than forty percent of games are not decided in the middlegame but in the endgame. And most endgame errors are not complex tactical errors. They are basic errors. Errors that a good book or a good interactive course can prevent.

However, there is one thing this edition does not clearly state. The number of exercises, the depth of the curriculum, and the price are not disclosed in the announcement. That makes it difficult to assess the true value of the product. A good interactive course is one with enough exercises to build reflexes and enough system to guide the learner from basic to complex endgames. If there are only a few dozen exercises, then no matter how good the interactivity is, it cannot replace the thousands of exercises on free platforms.

This is the contradiction I want to raise. While ChessBase is right that interactive options have become indispensable in video courses, that same fact raises a question: if interactivity has become the minimum standard, what is the real differentiator of this product?

The answer may lie elsewhere. Not in technology. In the guide. Karsten Müller does not merely provide exercises. He provides order. He provides a way of seeing. In chess, the order of learning matters as much as the content of learning. A self-taught learner on Lichess will have thousands of exercises but no one to show them where to begin, where to stop, and where to return when they fail. Müller provides precisely that. He is a guide, not a map-seller.

And that is why, in a market where everything seems free, there is still room for a paid product. Learners do not pay for information. They pay for guidance. They pay for knowing that someone has spent twenty-five years thinking about the same problem they are struggling with.

When I think of young chess generations in Vietnam, in China, in Southeast Asia, where chess is growing fast but training systems are still young, I see the value of products like this. Not because they are perfect. Because they are part of an ecosystem where endgame knowledge is passed down systematically rather than by accident through games.

There is one thing I always remember when writing about chess. Years ago, I visited a tournament in a small province in China. There I met an old coach who had taught chess to children for more than forty years. He had no computer. He had no software. He had only a wooden board and a yellowed notebook. I asked what he taught. He said: I teach endgames first. Openings can come later. But endgames must be taught from the start, because that is where children understand the value of each piece.

I have thought about that sentence a great deal. In modern chess, people usually teach openings first, because openings can be memorized, checked by machine, and produce quick results. Endgames cannot. Endgames demand patience, endurance, and a kind of deep understanding that cannot come from memorization. The endgame is where chess becomes an art of slowness.

And in an era where everything is fast, slowness becomes a form of resistance.

An empty stadium still holds the applause of the departed. I have thought about this line while walking past a deserted chess training room on an evening. On the board, an unfinished game. No one was playing. But the pieces still stood in their positions, as if waiting for someone to return. Chess, in a certain sense, is like that. Games end, but they never truly end. They are still waiting to be analyzed, understood, and passed on.

Karsten Müller has done that work for twenty-five years. And this new edition of the Endgame Academy is a way for him to continue that work, but with a new tool.

What I find most interesting about this product is not the technology. It is how it is positioned. In a market where chess education products are usually advertised by emphasizing speed of improvement, by how many rating points you can gain in how long, a product focused on endgames is a notable choice. It is like a school deciding to teach students how to write a correct sentence before teaching them to write a good essay. Slow, but right.

Among the young players I have followed, those with a solid endgame foundation always carry a certain advantage. They do not win fast. They do not win beautifully. But they do not lose. And in long tournaments, where every half-point is precious, not losing matters as much as winning. The endgame is the weapon of those who know how to protect what they have.

I saw this at a youth tournament in Shanghai a few years ago. A fifteen-year-old boy, rated lower than his opponent, held a drawn endgame that everyone thought he would lose. He did nothing special. He just played the correct moves. One at a time. And in the end, his opponent, a stronger player, had to accept a draw. After the game, I asked the boy his secret. He said: I studied endgames well. I do not remember where I learned it, but I remember I studied a lot.

That is what an Endgame Academy aims at. Not just knowledge. Reflex. The muscle memory of the mind, shaped through thousands of repetitions.

However, I also want to raise another question. Twenty-five years. That is the span ChessBase has been associated with Karsten Müller. In those twenty-five years, how much has the chess world changed? Engines have become invincible. Top-level games have become so accurate that it is hard to create separation through pure tactics. Against that backdrop, the endgame remains one of the few places where humans can still make a difference. Not by playing moves the engine would not consider. By playing moves humans tend to forget.

The truth is that modern top players usually have excellent endgame technique. But the gap between them and mid-level players remains vast, and most of that gap lies in the endgame. A mid-level player can play on par with a grandmaster for the first thirty moves. But when the board shrinks, the gap appears. And that is why the endgame remains the most worthwhile study topic for serious players.

I think about chess learners in Vietnam, where I was born. There, chess is growing rapidly, but study material in Vietnamese remains limited, especially on endgames. Products like ChessBase's Endgame Academy, though not cheap, are a way to access high-quality knowledge. And in a world where English is not the mother tongue of many chess players, products that are visually and interactively well designed can overcome language barriers better than books.

I remember once, a young coach in Hanoi wrote to me, asking whether he should have his students study endgames through video or through books. I replied: both, but more importantly, there must be a system. Without a system, learners will only study what they like and skip what they need. The endgame is a field where system matters more than in most other areas of chess. You cannot learn endgames randomly.

And perhaps that is what this edition of the Endgame Academy tries to provide: a system. A path. An order.

But I must also be honest. In a world where Lichess offers thousands of free endgame exercises, and Chessable offers interactive courses at more affordable prices, a paid product needs a very strong reason to exist. And that reason, in this case, is likely Karsten Müller himself. Not the technology. Not the interface. The man sitting behind it all.

Because in education, and especially in chess education, the guide matters more than the tool. A great teacher with a pencil can teach better than a mediocre teacher with a modern computer system. And if there is one person who can teach endgames better than most, that person is very likely Karsten Müller.

I do not know whether this edition of the Endgame Academy will succeed commercially. I do not have enough data to judge that. But I know one thing: over the past twenty-five years, many young players have studied endgames through Müller's material, and some of them have become strong players. That is no small achievement. In a world where everyone wants speed, Müller chose slowness. And over twenty-five years, that slowness has become a legacy.

The most romantic mistake of mine was believing that the ball knows how to write poetry. I once wrote that line about football, in an article about a last-minute free kick. But looking back, I see it applies to chess too. It is not the pieces that write poetry. It is the players, in the final moments of a game, when everything is exhausted and only the bare truth of the board remains, who know how to write poetry. They know how to write the final lines of a story with moves no one could have taught them. And that is the moment the endgame becomes art.

I have spent many years writing about such moments. And over the years, I have realized those moments do not come from luck. They come from preparation. From thousands of hours at the board, from repeated exercises, from books read and re-read. Karsten Müller does not create poetic moments. He creates the conditions under which those moments can occur.

As I write these lines, I think of the fourteen-year-old boy in that rainy room in Shanghai. I do not know where he is now. Perhaps he quit chess. Perhaps he is still playing. But I know one thing: in those forty minutes of silence before three pieces, he learned something no classroom could teach. He learned that the endgame is not the last part of a game. It is the beginning of a new way of understanding.

And perhaps, after twenty-five years, that is still what Karsten Müller is trying to teach us.

I am not writing this to advise anyone to buy or not buy a product. I am writing to remind that in an increasingly fast, increasingly loud chess world, increasingly dominated by numbers and indices, there are still those who choose to go slow. And if there is a lesson from Müller's twenty-five years, it is this: slowness is not weakness. It is a form of strength.

In chess, the winner is not the fastest mover. It is the one who knows when to stop, look carefully, and play one correct move. The endgame teaches us that. And that is why the endgame, though considered the most boring part of chess, teaches us the most about life itself.

After three decades of holding a pen, I have realized I never wrote about sports. I only wrote about human beings, in brief moments, when they had to face themselves. Chess, like football, like every other sport, is only a pretext. And over twenty-five years, Karsten Müller has used that pretext to teach us how to face ourselves, one move at a time, in silence.

There is one question I would leave with readers. In a world where engines can calculate everything, why do we still need a human to teach the endgame? The answer may not lie in knowledge. It lies in presence. We need someone to remind us that behind every move, there is a human. Behind every mistake, an opportunity to learn. And behind every endgame, a game that has not yet ended.

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