ChessBase Calls on Kostya Kavutskiy: The Quiet Race of the Chess-Teaching Market

On a rainy October afternoon in Da Nang, I sat in a small coffee shop on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street, earphones plugged into an old laptop, and heard a sound I never expected to remember so long: the click of a mouse.

Not the decisive click of a blitz game, that crisp snap when a player drops a piece and hits the clock. Not the frantic clicking of someone trying to save a lost position. This was a slow, hesitant, repeated click — the sound of someone rewinding a lecture video, three seconds back, four seconds, five, just to hear one sentence again.

The person beside me was a fifteen-year-old boy, a member of a small chess club in Hai Chau district. He was watching an online course. On screen, an English-speaking man was lecturing about pawn structure. The boy did not understand all the English, but he kept watching, kept rewinding, kept taking notes in a small notebook in messy handwriting. I asked what he was learning. He said: "Learning how to think slowly."

Those four words followed me all afternoon. Because in the chess world I have covered for more than thirteen years, people usually talk about fast moves, lightning combinations, games decided in an instant. Rarely does anyone talk about teaching a child how to think slowly. Yet right now, in a very hidden corner of the global chess world, a shift is taking place — and it is not on the board. It is in the recording studio.

On December 9, 2026, ChessBase published the second part of Jochen Schwarz's review series on Robert Ris's FritzTrainer courses, while introducing two new courses by a different name: Kostya Kavutskiy. The two courses are titled "Mastering Calculation" and "The Fundamentals of Positional Play." This is not a report about a tournament. No ranking changed, no title was awarded. But to me, it deserves more time than usual, because it tells a different story: the story of who is teaching chess to the world, and why that matters so much.

When the stadium is empty, I first hear the ball speak for tens of thousands of people. I wrote that line years ago, in a piece about a season without spectators. But only on this Da Nang afternoon did I understand how true it is for chess. Chess is, by nature, an empty stadium. There is no cheering, no stands, no one shouting when a queen is traded. All that remains is the sound of thinking. And a chess teacher is precisely the person trying to make that sound audible.

Context: a product line that has outlived many of its makers

To understand why a course review deserves analysis, one must know who ChessBase is.

ChessBase was founded in 2026 in Hamburg, Germany, by Frederic Friedel and Matthias Wullenweber. It was a moment when personal computers were just beginning to enter chess clubs. At first, ChessBase was a database program — a place to store games, look up openings, and give players a tool they could previously only dream of. For decades, the name was tied to something very specific: the world's largest game database, and later an entire ecosystem of analysis software.

Then came the FritzTrainer line. This is a range of video and software training products, delivered by named authors. Buyers receive a package of lecture videos, model games, and an interactive interface for self-training. For nearly two decades, FritzTrainer has been one of ChessBase's most stable revenue streams. It turns chess knowledge into a commodity. And more importantly, it turns chess teachers into brands.

That is the crux. FritzTrainer does not sell openings. It sells people.

Someone who buys a Robert Ris course is not just buying a set of opening variations. They are buying how Robert Ris thinks. They are buying his voice, his teaching rhythm, the way he pauses at a position and says: "Here you should feel uncomfortable." That feeling of discomfort is not in any database. It is in the teacher's mind.

So when ChessBase announces a new author, it is not adding a course. It is adding a voice to an already crowded choir. And in a choir, the question is always: can this new voice sing a note the old ones could not?

Kostya Kavutskiy: a teacher built on credentials, not on ratings

The first thing to say about Kostya Kavutskiy is what the article does not say: he is not introduced with a single rating number.

In the chess world, this is a detail worth pausing over. Normally, when a player is introduced, a rating comes along. 2600, 2700, career peak, world ranking. But Kavutskiy is described by other things: he is an International Master, an IM. He is a FIDE-certified trainer. He is an author.

No number about his playing strength appears in that article. And that absence is not an oversight. It is a statement.

Because Kavutskiy is not being sold as a player. He is being sold as a teacher. And in the teaching market, a coaching title can sometimes carry more commercial value than a Grandmaster title.

Think about it coldly. A 2650 Grandmaster can beat most of the people who buy his course. But beating is not teaching. Many extremely strong players cannot explain why they are strong. They just know. That knowing sits deep in instinct, and instinct does not translate into a lecture. Conversely, an IM with pedagogical talent can see exactly where an amateur gets stuck, because he was once stuck there, and he remembers the way out.

Kavutskiy is the second type. He is an American player, born in 2026, long associated with the content ecosystem of Chess.com and Chessable before arriving at ChessBase. He is one of the faces of a new generation of authors — a generation that does not only write, but also streams, interacts, and builds a community around itself.

And this is where I want to linger.

For years I have covered tournaments and taken notes on players. I keep a notebook of ratings, results, form. But I also keep another notebook, for things that cannot be measured. In that second book I write about how a player sits, how he places his hand on the queen before deciding, how he exhales when the opponent plays something unexpected. The two notebooks are never blended when I write. But both are necessary, and both taught me that the value of a person in chess does not fit inside a single number.

Kavutskiy is living proof of that. Judged only by rating, he is not the brightest name. Judged by ability to communicate, he is in the leading group. And the teaching market is increasingly paying for communication, not for playing strength.

Two courses, and one truth about the amateur market

The two new courses have telling titles: "Mastering Calculation" and "The Fundamentals of Positional Play."

Notice the word "Fundamentals." And the word "Mastering." Both point in one direction: the intermediate player who wants to move up.

This is not advanced opening theory. This is not analysis for top players. These are the core skills anyone who wants to play better must have: the ability to calculate, that is, to see ahead through moves and variations; and the ability to understand positions, that is, to know when to trade, when to keep, when to push a pawn.

I have spent years observing chess clubs in Vietnam, from small classes in Da Nang to larger centers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. And I can tell you something few say out loud: the chess-teaching market does not live on top players. It lives on intermediate ones.

A 2700 Grandmaster does not buy a course on positional fundamentals. He already knows. But a 1500 player, stuck at that threshold for three years, who feels he keeps losing in the middlegame without understanding why — that player will buy. And not just once. They buy course after course, because they believe the next one will be the one that breaks the wall.

That is the heart of the entire chess-teaching economy: the pain of the intermediate player. Not championship ambition, but blockage. And Kavutskiy's two courses are designed precisely to touch that pain. Calculation and positional play — the two skills intermediate players feel weakest in, and the two hardest to train alone.

A person can self-study openings by consulting a database. A person can self-study endgames by solving puzzles. But calculation is much harder to self-study, because to train it you need someone to point out where your line of thought goes wrong. And positional play is even harder, because it has no clear right or wrong — only subtlety, and subtlety must be transmitted, not looked up.

So these two courses are not accidental. They are a calculated move by a publisher that understands its customers very well.

The reviewer in the audience seat

There is one small detail in the article I like: the reviewer is Jochen Schwarz, described as a club-level player.

This matters more than it appears.

If a Grandmaster reviewed a course for intermediate players, the review would be useless. Because the Grandmaster no longer remembers what an intermediate player feels. He crossed that threshold too long ago. He no longer knows which spot confuses a 1500 player, because to him that spot is as obvious as daylight.

But a club player knows. He is in the very room the course is trying to open. He can say: this part I understood, this part I had to rewind three times, this part I still do not understand even after rewatching. That is valuable data, and it is why letting a club player review a course for club players is a sound editorial choice.

I think about this when I recall my own early mistake in front of a microphone. In 2026, as an intern in Da Nang, I was assigned to commentate an online U21 match between Vietnam and Timor-Leste at Hoa Xuan stadium. In the 23rd minute, I misread the opposing number 9's name from "Garcia" to "Pedro" three times in a row. Viewers in the central Vietnam group said I talked like I was reading a newspaper. I was so ashamed I wanted to disappear.

But I did not quit. I spent a full month rewatching footage from the whole tournament, writing down the correct pronunciation of every player. By the end, I had memorized nearly 200 names. And from then on, I began keeping two notebooks side by side: one for data, one for emotion.

Mistakes in front of a microphone taught me that perfection is only the draft of sincerity. I have written that line many times. But it is true of chess teachers too. A technically perfect course with no sincerity teaches no one. And a sincere course without structure also fails. A good chess teacher walks both wires at once.

Robert Ris and Ivan Sokolov: two shadows a newcomer must pass through

The review places Kavutskiy beside two established names: Robert Ris and Ivan Sokolov.

Robert Ris is a Dutch International Master, known for many FritzTrainer courses and especially for his work on the middlegame. He is regarded as one of ChessBase's most prolific authors, with a gift for turning dry subjects into rhythmic lectures.

Ivan Sokolov is a Grandmaster, born in 2026, once among Europe's strongest players, and later an influential author of courses on the middlegame and strategy. Sokolov is the classic teacher type: stern, deep, and sometimes hard to please in his judgments of positions.

Placing Kavutskiy beside these two is a deliberate editorial choice. It tells the reader: this is a new author, and we judge him by the measure of the best we have.

But it also says something else, more subtle: Kavutskiy is stepping into an already crowded space.

Look at the subjects. Ris has done the middlegame. Sokolov has done strategy and the middlegame. And now Kavutskiy does calculation and positional play. There is overlap. Not full duplication, but close enough that a buyer must ask: whom should I choose?

This is a risk few mention, but it is real: the risk of internal product cannibalization. When a publisher has several authors working on nearby subjects, they are not only competing with outside rivals. They are competing with themselves. In that competition the buyer benefits — but the seller must be very careful not to dilute its own brand.

Core analysis: the economy of voices

This is the part I want to spend the most time on, because it is what is truly happening.

Over the past two decades, the chess-teaching market has undergone a major shift, and it can be summed up in one sentence: from product to person.

In the early period, people bought books. A good chess book was a static asset, with no author standing behind it throughout the reading. You read, you close the book, and the author disappears. In the next period, people bought software and DVDs. Still static, but now with a voice. Then came online video and interactive courses, when the author became a companion.

And now we are in a stage where the author is not merely a companion. The author is the product.

Look at how Kavutskiy is introduced. He is not introduced through course content. He is introduced through himself: an IM, a FIDE Trainer, an author, a person with a community. The people who buy his courses may already know him, from streams, from free lectures, from online conversations. They are not buying because of a subject. They are buying because of who the teacher is.

This is the central feature of the creative economy in chess: content has become easy to copy, but personality cannot be. Anyone can teach you how to calculate a fork. But no one can teach it the way Kavutskiy does. And that uncopyable quality is exactly what platforms pay to acquire.

This explains why ChessBase recruits an author from outside its own ecosystem rather than producing content in-house. They are not just buying content. They are buying an existing audience. They are buying attention.

And this is where the story expands beyond ChessBase.

The platform war: ChessBase, Chess.com and Chessable

One cannot discuss the chess-teaching market without discussing platform competition.

ChessBase is the classic giant. Born in the software era, it is strong on databases, on analysis tools, on academic seriousness. But it is not strong on social-scale community.

Chess.com is the modern giant. With tens of millions of users, it owns an ecosystem any publisher would envy: play chess, learn chess, watch chess, all in one app. In 2026, Chess.com acquired Chessable, a platform specializing in chess courses built on spaced repetition. It was a strategic blow: Chess.com did not just have players, it had learners.

And in 2026, Chess.com went on to acquire the Play Magnus Group, another chess conglomerate. That consolidation changed the balance of power in world chess in ways we will still feel for years.

In that context, what is ChessBase's position?

ChessBase is the keeper of a tradition. It has academic credibility, a database professionals still use, and a FritzTrainer line old enough to be a brand. But it does not have Chess.com's community scale. And in the creative economy, community scale is a very large advantage.

So ChessBase recruiting Kavutskiy is not merely a product move. It is a defensive move. They are trying to add to their author roster names that can bring audiences with them. They are trying to compete through people, because that is where they can compete.

I have followed such shifts for years, across many sports. And there is a rule I believe holds for almost all of them: when two platforms compete, the ultimate winner is not the platform, but the creator. Because platforms must pay more to keep and attract them.

The transfer window is the symphony of the future; only when the ball rolls does the past earn the right to judge. I wrote that about football, but it holds for the chess-teaching market too. Today's author contracts are the notes of a symphony no one has heard in full. Only when students start paying, or do not, will we know who was right.

Why this story matters for Vietnam

Someone will ask: what does a German publisher hiring an American author have to do with us?

I think it matters more than people realize.

Vietnam has a generation of players to be proud of. Le Quang Liem is our leading Grandmaster, who climbed into the world elite and became a familiar face in international events. Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son, another Grandmaster, has left his mark on many arenas. Pham Le Thao Nguyen is one of the region's notable women players.

But what I want to say is not about their results. It is that we have good players, but we do not yet have a teaching industry of real scale.

Look at the reality. In Vietnam, most chess teaching still happens at a small scale: a class at a club, one teacher and one student, a group of parents gathering their children together. That is beautiful as community. But it does not create a content ecosystem that can reach the world.

Meanwhile, a teacher in Germany can record a course and sell it to tens of thousands of people everywhere. A teacher in the US can build a community around himself and turn it into a career. That is not about talent. It is about systems.

And here is what I believe is the biggest lesson from the Kavutskiy story. The value of a chess teacher no longer lies in how strong they are, but in how many people they can reach. A good teacher in Da Nang may reach only twenty students. A teacher in Da Nang who knows how to record his lectures may reach twenty thousand. The difference is not knowledge. It is vision.

Contrarian angle: the death of the course has been predicted too many times

Now to the part where I speak against the wind.

In recent years, one prediction has been repeated everywhere: paid chess courses will die. They will be replaced by free online videos. They will be replaced by artificial intelligence. A machine can analyze a position better than any teacher, so why pay a human?

It sounds very reasonable. But I do not believe it.

And I do not believe it for one very concrete reason, drawn from what I have observed.

Chess analysis machines have been stronger than humans for a long time. In 2026, Deep Blue beat the world champion. By 2026, AlphaZero astonished the entire chess world. Yet in nearly three decades since 2026, the chess-teaching market has not collapsed. It has grown. It has grown even more strongly, because the machine made more people care about chess.

Why?

Because a machine answers the question "which move is best," but it does not answer the question "why do I keep going wrong at this point." The machine gives you answers. The teacher gives you understanding. And understanding is what humans need from humans.

Let us return to the boy in the Da Nang coffee shop. He could open analysis software and see the best move in every position at once. But he still sits there, rewinding the video, listening to a man talk about pawn structure. Why? Because he does not need answers. He needs someone to lead the way.

So the prediction of the death of the course is right at the content level and wrong at the human level. Yes, chess content has become free and abundant. But humans are not free. A teacher's attention on you is not free. And that is why a well-designed course still has value.

Yet I must admit this: the pressure is real. Artificial intelligence does not kill courses, but it forces them to change. A course that merely transmits knowledge will die, because knowledge is already free. A course that transmits a way of thinking, of feeling, of self-correcting — will live. And that is exactly the direction Kavutskiy's two courses aim at.

This is the blind spot of collective memory. We are used to thinking of technology as a tsunami that will sweep everything away. But technology usually does not sweep. It pushes water into the hollows and leaves the high ground dry. The job of a professional is to find the high ground, instead of standing in the hollow and lamenting.

The real risk is not the rival, but the room itself

When I sat down to list the risks in this story, I realized something: the biggest risk does not come from outside.

It does not come from Chess.com. It does not come from artificial intelligence. It comes from ChessBase's own product catalogue.

Think about it. Someone who wants to learn the middlegame can buy Ris. Or Sokolov. Or Kavutskiy. Three options, one platform, overlapping subjects. For the buyer, that is abundance. For the seller, it is a problem of allocating attention.

But the second risk is subtler: dependence on outside people.

When a platform builds its catalogue around external authors, it bets on those people staying. And people can always leave. They can grow tired. They can be courted by rivals at a higher price. They can simply stop wanting to do it. The platform owns a database, but it does not own a human voice.

This is a paradox of the creative economy: the most valuable thing is the hardest thing to own.

And there is a third risk, dimmer but worth noting: the author's own exhaustion. Kavutskiy is not only a course author. He is a coach, a streamer, a community builder. Each role demands a different part of the same person. There is a limit to how many times one person can split himself before quality starts to drop.

I have seen this many times in sport. A talented coach takes on too many roles, and then one day his voice loses its freshness. The audience does not say so, but they feel it. They leave slowly, like water retreating from a shore no one notices.

On the date, and a necessary caution

There is one small detail in the original article I want to raise, because I believe in verifying before writing.

The publication date is given as "9/12/2026." This format is ambiguous. In the US, the month comes before the day, meaning September 12. In Europe, the day comes before the month, meaning December 9. And both readings produce a date in the future relative to when we usually see this kind of report.

I do not raise this to nitpick. I raise it because I have a habit: before writing, I open three sources side by side to verify. If a detail does not match, I do not write it as certain fact. I write it as something needing further verification.

That caution is not timidity. It is foundation. An article built on a false detail collapses very fast, no matter how beautiful the rest is.

What is really being sold here

I want to return once more to the central question: what are we buying when we buy a chess course?

Not knowledge. Knowledge is everywhere.

Not answers. Answers are free.

Not the prestige of a title. Titles teach no one.

We are buying a stretch of time with a companion. We are buying the feeling that someone is walking with us along the long, lonely road of learning chess. We are buying the patience of a person who once stood where we stand, and made it through.

And this is where I think the story touches something larger than chess.

In every field — sport, music, academia, life itself — we are witnessing an identical shift. Machines can do more and more. They do it faster, more accurately, more cheaply. But they cannot do one thing: they cannot be with you.

The microphone does not make the storyteller. It is the silence of the stands that signs every line. I wrote that line and believe it. In chess there are no stands, no microphone. There is only one person at a screen, and another at the other end of a video. But the silence is the same. And the signature is the same.

Signals to watch in the coming months

If I had to tell an editor what to watch, I would say three things.

First, the learners' response. The two new courses will get ratings, rankings, first comments. Those numbers will show whether the strategy built on author personality works.

Second, the next author announcements. If ChessBase keeps signing new faces, that is a sign they are pushing the talent competition with Chess.com. If they stop, it may be a sign the strategy is not meeting expectations.

Third, prices. If course prices start falling, or if they get bundled into subscriptions, that is a sign the pressure from free content and artificial intelligence is becoming truly serious.

These three signals are small. But the great changes in any industry begin with small signals like these. The question is whether you are looking in the right place.

Freezing a moment

I return to the Da Nang coffee shop in my memory.

The fifteen-year-old boy is still there, earphones still in, mouse still clicking. On screen, the English-speaking teacher is still lecturing about some pawn structure I cannot quite see. Outside, the rain still falls on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street.

I do not know whether that boy will become a strong player. Maybe yes. Maybe no. But I know one thing: on that afternoon, someone very far away, perhaps in America, perhaps in Germany, took the time to record what he knew, and a child in Da Nang took the time to listen. Between those two strangers, a thread was stretched tight. And that thread is exactly what the entire chess-teaching industry is trying to sell.

Sports culture is the graveyard of names, so that their stories live one more inning. I wrote that about players who have passed. But perhaps it holds for teachers too. Most courses will be forgotten. Most authors will no longer be mentioned. But while they live, they are doing something very concrete: they are keeping a child seated one more afternoon at the board.

And in a world where everything tries to make you leave, keeping someone seated is an achievement.

Sport does not promise victory; it only promises a heartbeat willing to continue. Perhaps that is true of chess too, and of those who teach it. They do not promise to make you a Grandmaster. They only promise to be there, in the next video, waiting for you to rewind once more.

As for the platform race, the author wars, the calculations of market share and catalogue — all of it will continue, loud and persistent, in meeting rooms we never see. But the final outcome of all that noise will not be decided there. It will be decided in some small coffee shop, when a child decides to rewind a video a third time, or decides to shut the laptop and go outside.

We do not know the answer. But at least we should know that the question is being asked — not on the board, but somewhere much farther away.