ChessBase Adds a New FritzTrainer Author: The Chess Instruction Market Is Shifting Its Axis

A late weekend afternoon, in a small chess club on Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Street, I sat behind a ninth-grade student opening a lecture on a tablet. He rewound a passage on a combination, paused at second 212, and wrote three moves on paper. His mother sat beside him and asked the price of the course. He read out a figure in dollars, and she nodded without a question. That scene has repeated many times over recent years, and it says something the chess commentariat rarely states plainly: the money in this game comes mostly not from tournaments but from selling skill to amateur players. A report published on ChessBase in mid-December 2026 gave me one more piece to understand how that market runs, and who is really holding the pieces. The story turns on FritzTrainer, ChessBase’s flagship line of video courses and training software. The German chess-software company was founded in 2026 and is known for its game database and its Fritz engine. FritzTrainer has been the training shelf for generations of serious players: buy a set of lectures, install it, and study along an author’s curriculum. The report says ChessBase is adding an author to the line: Kostya Kavutskiy, an International Master and a FIDE-certified trainer. Kavutskiy debuts two courses, “Mastering Calculation” and “The Fundamentals of Positional Play.” A reviewer named Jochen Schwarz, introduced as a knowledgeable club player, compares the two courses with ChessBase’s own veteran authors, Robert Ris and Ivan Sokolov. The two titles tell almost the whole story. Calculation is seeing ahead into variations; Positional Play is playing by structure and plan. These are the two foundational skill pillars of the amateur player, not elite opening theory. What is noteworthy lies elsewhere: a long-established platform is bringing in a new face, and handing him exactly the topics its older authors have long occupied. A slightly wider view helps read the report correctly. After the series “The Queen’s Gambit” aired in 2026, chess went through an unprecedented surge of new players. Online platforms swelled fast, and the amateur learning tier — students, parents, working adults chasing Elo — became the real revenue engine. Chessable, a chess-course platform, was acquired by Chess.com in 2026 and has since become a machine for signing top authors. That is the ground this product report stands on. Before going on, let me state a limit. The report’s date line reads “9/12/2026,” an ambiguous format between 9 December and 12 September, depending on US or European convention. The report also carries no sales data, no number of buyers, no ratings. Any judgment on the quality of the two courses therefore sits at the level of opinion. For a product report that is normal, but it forces me to separate the facts from the marketing. To read the report correctly, place it in the market it belongs to. Professional chess has prizes, Elo, and rankings. But chess as a business lives on a different tier: amateur players, students, parents, and adults who want to improve. That is the paying tier, and also the largest. Kavutskiy’s two courses aim straight at it. There is a comparison worth making here. When a big tournament is played, fans follow the moves of grandmasters. But when a club player wants to gain a hundred Elo, they do not buy a grandmaster’s moves; they buy a way of thinking. And a way of thinking sells many times over, far more than a move. A game is watched once; a lecture on calculation is rewatched dozens of times, by thousands of people, over years. The transfer market is chess, not a card game — but many sporting directors still like to flip cards. Here, ChessBase’s move is clear: sign someone who already has an audience, rather than develop an unknown author from scratch. Kavutskiy is not introduced by Elo. He is introduced by titles: International Master, FIDE trainer, author. Those three labels do not say how strong he is at the board; they say he has the right to teach. In the chess content economy, the FIDE trainer title has become a kind of commercial currency, detached from competitive results. Someone can never win a tournament and still sell a course, as long as the title is enough for a parent to trust. One detail I consider more important than all the rest: Kavutskiy comes from the content ecosystem of Chess.com and Chessable, ChessBase’s biggest rival in the online training market. ChessBase recruiting a familiar face from the other side is the signal of a war for teachers, not for players. Whichever platform keeps the most magnetic faces keeps the monthly subscription revenue. ChessBase, here, is buying distribution and audience, not only content. No tactic is old; only the reading of the game expires. That holds too for how a platform reads its own market. The FritzTrainer line was a product of another era: one where learners bought a disc, installed it, and studied offline alone. Today learners pay monthly for a platform, and they choose the platform by the teacher. Selling a boxed set sells once; keeping a magnetic author sells many times. ChessBase understands this, and this report is a move in that direction. There is an internal risk few mention. Robert Ris and Ivan Sokolov already have courses on calculation, on positional play, on openings. When ChessBase adds Kavutskiy on exactly those topics, the company’s catalogue begins to compete with itself. Buyers will hesitate among three authors for the same skill, and that hesitation can dilute revenue rather than add to it. This is a problem any content publisher faces when it expands its author roster. At a deeper level, this market is shifting its axis from content to identity. Once, the value of a course lay in the quality of the moves taught. Now the value lies in the teacher, the voice, the style, the community around the person. A student buys Kavutskiy’s course because they trust how he teaches, more than because he is strong. This explains why an International Master can compete commercially with a grandmaster: people are not buying strength, they are buying guidance. Now to the part I consider the blind spot. People tend to assume a good player will be a good teacher. Experience in the trade says otherwise many times over. A grandmaster can calculate ten moves in his head and fail to explain why he chose the third. An International Master who has stood in front of a class, who has coached, can break that same process into steps for a beginner. Competitive titles and pedagogical ability are two different things, and the training market lives on the second. I should also speak plainly about this review itself. A review with an independent appraiser, published in multiple parts, on the very platform that sells the product, carries two roles at once: information and marketing. I am not saying the reviewer is dishonest; I am saying the line between editorial and advertising is very thin here. For the reader, that means every compliment must be weighed against a question: what data stands behind it? The biggest risk, the one the report does not mention, is commoditization. Chess instructional content is losing its scarcity. Free lectures online, video channels, and now AI-based training assistants are making a paid course harder to sell each year. When the underlying knowledge becomes free, the paid product must sell something else: companionship, personal feedback, certification, community. The question is no longer whether a course teaches correctly, but why a learner should pay for it when a free version sits right beside it. I have seen something similar in another field. In 2026, when world football paused for the pandemic, I was assigned to rebuild a prediction model and found that three seasons of old data had lost part of their value. In 2026 I threw away half of my old dataset, because football after the shutdown is a different sport. The chess training market today is at a similar break point: how people learn has changed, and the old sales dataset no longer reads out anything certain. A heat map can lie, but five failed presses in a row cannot. In chess, the equivalent of “five failed presses” is five students abandoning a course halfway. That is the real measure of a training product, and it does not appear in the report. What is worth watching in the coming months is not whether Kavutskiy’s two courses are good or bad, but the market’s reaction. If sales are strong, it confirms a principle: in modern chess, the teacher matters as much as, or more than, the content taught. If sales stall, it reminds us that learners already have too many free options to pay for a name. As for me, I will still sit behind students in small clubs, noting at which second they pause the video, and whether they come back for a second viewing. That is real data, and it tells a more honest story than any product-launch report.