ChessBase Refreshes Endgame Academy: Karsten Müller's 25 Years of Endgames and the Limits of Interactive Learning

In the summer of 2026, at a small chess class on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street, I sat behind an eleven-year-old boy working through endgame exercises on a computer. He hit the show-solution button every seven seconds, finished twenty positions in four minutes, and turned around to ask me, his voice full of confidence. I did not answer right away. I copied those twenty positions into my notebook. Three weeks later I gave them back to him, this time with no solution button. He solved four. Four out of twenty is the number I have kept in my professional notebook for twelve years, because it says exactly one thing every chess education platform knows but few dare print: the speed at which you complete exercises has nothing to do with whether you actually learn endgames. On August 14, 2026, that old story came back in a new shape. ChessBase announced a refreshed edition of its Endgame Academy, opening with Checkmate & Pawn Endgames, authored by Karsten Müller. Müller is a German endgame specialist, the author of the Endgame Corner column and many books on the final phase of the game. ChessBase places him in the position they call the best there is when it comes to endgames. To add weight, they brought in Michael Kotyk, a young chess trainer in Hamburg, to examine the product with a magnifying glass and share his impressions. The platform also stresses that interactive options have become indispensable in today's video courses. The phrase 25 years ago marks twenty-five years of partnership between Müller and ChessBase, a branding milestone more than a piece of technical information. The interesting part sits elsewhere. In chess, the endgame is the phase where amateur players drop the most points, and also the phase they train the least. Openings offer thousands of videos and millions of games to copy. Endgames demand something else: the patience to count moves, the ability to calculate accurately square by square, and a structured memory of model positions. There is no inspiration here, only discipline. That is precisely why the endgame is where a good course can make the biggest difference. A club player in Vietnam may have memorized fifteen moves of a Sicilian, yet in an endgame with king, rook, and three pawns he lets half a point slip away. The structure of Checkmate & Pawn Endgames goes straight to the foundation. Checkmate is the first brick of all endgame technique, and pawn endgames are the laboratory where every calculating principle is laid bare: the pawn square, the waiting move, the opposition. Putting these two topics first is a sound pedagogical decision. It shows the editorial team is thinking about a learning path that develops skill in sequence, not a pile of exercises assembled to look good. That summer in the V-League I learned one thing: a formation is only beautiful when the opponent agrees to stand still. An endgame path is the same, it is only beautiful when the learner agrees to sit and calculate before looking at the answer. In Vietnam, the youth chess movement is growing fast, but structured endgame material in Vietnamese remains thin. That is why a reputable international course still has a place, provided language barriers and cost do not turn it into something reserved for a small group. The most interesting part is the interactivity. ChessBase states that interactive options have become indispensable. That is true, but it describes a standard, not an advantage. Chessable brought a spaced-repetition mechanic into its MoveTrainer years ago. Lichess gives away thousands of endgame exercises, sorted by theme, free of charge. The question is no longer whether a course is interactive, but which kind of interactivity it uses, and whether it forces the learner to commit to a decision before seeing the answer. I go back to the boy in 2026. His solution button was the crudest form of interactivity, click to consume. Real interactivity works the other way: it makes the learner enter a move, grades it immediately, and forces the same missed position back onto the board another day. The difference between the two is not the interface. It is who is doing the work: the learner or the software. No tactic is ever old; only your way of reading the game expires. Müller has analyzed endgames for twenty-five years, and the basic positions do not change. What changes is how learners approach them. A king-and-pawn position Philidor wrote about in the eighteenth century is still valid, but if it is stuffed into a video for the learner to watch passively, its pedagogical value expired long ago. On Müller's authority, I have nothing to object to. In chess circles, his books and columns are cross-checked, quoted, and corrected against one another as part of a healthy academic life. That is the kind of reputation built by agreeing to be verified. But a distinction matters: an author's authority and the quality of a packaged product are two different things. The announcement does not tell us how long the course is, how many exercises it contains, what it costs, or whether the interactive features require installed software. The announcement also reveals a familiar strategic move: keeping users inside the ecosystem. When a reputable author like Müller is tied to one platform, learners tend to buy the software, buy the database, then buy more courses. In chess, where the community is long accustomed to free sources, this is the only way to compete: sell continuity and depth, not isolated exercises. This is the blind spot I want to name plainly. The announcement is titled 25 years ago. For a market reader, that title is a two-way signal. On one hand, it celebrates a long commercial relationship. On the other, it hints that the product is a refresh built on an old foundation, not something wholly new. A course dressed in an anniversary tends to sell memory more than invention. That is not bad, because classic endgames need no invention. But a careful buyer has the right to ask: is the new interactivity genuinely new, or just an interface layer draped over old content? Second, ChessBase introducing its own product and then relaying praise from an invited trainer is a familiar communications structure. It is not wrong, but it is not independent verification. In twelve years of watching chess education products, I always wait for a review from someone with no stake in the outcome, and that usually means waiting a few weeks, until forums and the community speak up. Third, and this is what worries me most. When interactivity becomes a mandatory standard, the pressure is to make it exist, not to make it deep. A polished interface with smooth buttons can hide a pedagogical hole: the learner is still just clicking through positions without genuinely thinking through the calculation. A heat map can lie, but five consecutive failed presses cannot. In chess, a pretty progress chart can lie, but failing to solve a basic king-and-pawn position after three months of study cannot. Fourth, money. ChessBase sells courses inside a paid software ecosystem, tied to Fritz and its database. Lichess is free. Chess.com gives away a large part of its content. The transfer market is chess, not a card game, but many people in chess education prefer to flip cards. For young players in Vietnam, where a family has to weigh every dong spent on a child's chess, the real value of a paid endgame course has to be clearer than the two words authority. It has to be a path the free version does not offer: structured sequence, personalized error correction, and tracking of missed positions over weeks. Vietnam has produced players of real caliber, from Lê Quang Liêm to Nguyễn Ngọc Trường Sơn, and endgame technique is exactly the line between a good player and one who can win at the highest level. What I want to take from this announcement into my notebook is not the price of a course but a test. When the new Endgame Academy ships, I will follow a small group of students in Saigon and Hanoi and record whether they can re-solve the positions a month later with no answer key. If the number beats the four-out-of-twenty the boy reached in 2026, this course has done something worth doing. If not, we have one more good-looking product whose real value still sits somewhere between twenty-five years of memory.