Karsten Müller and 25 Years of the Endgame: ChessBase Repackages a Legacy

On August 14, 2026, ChessBase published a short product announcement. The headline reads like a trace of time: "25 years ago." Below it is the name Karsten Müller, and a less familiar name — Michael Kotyk, a young Hamburg chess trainer. The product: a new edition of Endgame Academy, opening with Müller's Checkmate & Pawn Endgames course. I read the announcement on a night train from Moscow. In my coat pocket is a notebook that has followed me for more than two decades, every page a position taken from games by Botvinnik and Smyslov. Next to it is a sheet of notes on the 2026 World Cup final, where I sat in the eastern stand sketching the space on the right flank after the 35th minute. Moscow 2026 — people remember the goals. I remember the space on the right flank. Reading ChessBase's announcement, I saw that chess, too, was selling back its memory under the cover of a new edition. "Seven months without football, seven months of never stopping to ask why." In 2026, when every competition stopped, I spent seven months building a dataset of 214 goalless draws across Europe's five top leagues, classified by nine pressing patterns. Football had no matches; chess had no tournaments. Both forced those of us who work in them back to the original question: what actually creates the depth of a player? For Müller, the answer lies in the endgame. To understand this announcement, Karsten Müller must be placed correctly. He is not famous for elite tournaments, but for something else: the endgame. He writes the Endgame Corner column, has collaborated with ChessBase for decades, and has published a long series of books on endgame theory. In chess literature, the phrase "nobody is better at the endgame than Karsten Müller" has been repeated often enough to become a convention. That convention has grounds: the endgame is a field the general public barely notices, where reputation is built by thousands of pages of analysis rather than by one beautiful win. ChessBase, the company behind the Fritz interface and a long-standing game database, presents Endgame Academy as a structured endgame learning platform. The most notable thing in the announcement is not the product name but how it is positioned. The phrase "25 years ago" suggests an anniversary. Michael Kotyk, introduced as a young trainer, appears as a verifier — he examines the product under a "magnifying glass" and gives his assessment. The editorial team concedes that in video courses, "interactive options have become indispensable." Those three elements — legacy, a young verifier, interactivity — form the entire positioning frame of the product. People usually read a product announcement linearly: what is new, what does it cost, who wrote it. I read it differently. "People watch players run. I watch the whole block shift." In football, a signing fills a position, but its real value lies in how the whole block moves. In chess, an endgame course teaches a few mating patterns, but its real value lies in how the learner makes decisions once the board is nearly empty. So the real question is not "what does this product contain" but "how does it shift the learner's study structure." The answer lies in the word "interactive." Over the past fifteen years, the chess education market has moved from a passive model to an active one. Learners no longer sit through a forty-minute video of a grandmaster lecturing. They solve exercises, compare moves, evaluate positions, and check against databases. Chessable, Lichess, and a range of other platforms have pushed interactivity into a minimum standard. When ChessBase says interactivity is "indispensable," it acknowledges a standard set elsewhere rather than announcing an invention. This reverses the usual reading of a product announcement. ChessBase is not leading the market with interactivity. It is leading with something else: access to an author no platform can replace. Müller is not content you can find free on YouTube. He is an exclusive asset, and interactivity is only the wrapper that lets that asset enter a new standard without losing its old prestige. From the sideline, the structure becomes clear. "From the sideline, I see the whole match." Whoever stands at the centre sees the product. Whoever stands at the edge sees the strategy behind it. ChessBase is not selling an endgame course. It is selling continuity — a closed ecosystem where users who already pay for Fritz software will pay more to keep their academic credibility inside the same interface. This is a retention strategy, executed subtly enough to look like an anniversary gift. The curriculum opens with Checkmate & Pawn Endgames. That choice is not random. Pawn endgames are the technical foundation, and mating patterns are the most basic building blocks. A programme starting with those two topics suggests a design built around skill progression rather than market appeal. But this is also where the announcement leaves its biggest gap: no exercise count, no depth, no price. Buyers cannot judge value for money, and that is no small omission in a commercial announcement. There is a paradox in the market structure that few notice. The endgame is the most durable knowledge segment in chess. Its principles were established over centuries and change very slowly. Openings, by contrast, change every season and with every elite game. A good endgame course therefore has a longer commercial shelf life than an opening course. ChessBase understands this, and attaching a "25-year" marker to an endgame product is a reasonable commercial decision. But the same logic creates pressure: if the endgame is durable, then free platforms like Lichess can also supply endless endgame exercises without extra payment. That pressure shapes the entire paid chess education market. The value of a product like Endgame Academy lies not in volume but in curation and progression. Anyone can supply a thousand endgame positions. Few can arrange them into a verified study path. Müller is among the few. That is the whole added value ChessBase is selling. But that value only exists if learners cannot build an equivalent path themselves. For an experienced grandmaster, that holds. For a club player trying to break through 1800 Elo, a well-organised set of endgame exercises from ChessBase could shorten hundreds of hours of guesswork. That is the customer segment the announcement targets, though it never says so outright. The counter-intuitive angle sits here. A product resting on Müller's name can make buyers feel safe, but that safety is itself the risk. The announcement is written by the vendor. Michael Kotyk is introduced as a verifier, but his relationship with ChessBase is not stated. A young Hamburg expert may be an independent user, or he may be an advertising partner. The announcement leaves it open. The greatest risk of the endgame course is not poor quality. Müller is unlikely to produce a bad product on the endgame. The risk lies elsewhere: buyers may already own a previous edition and be paying for a redesigned interface. "A system does not lie, but it can only be heard when the data is dense enough." This announcement is not yet dense. It says what the product contains, but not how it differs from what Müller has already published. In 2026, I made a similar mistake in football. I predicted Argentina would be eliminated in the World Cup quarter-finals because their defence was thin. I was wrong, and I wrote a 4,800-word self-criticism. The lesson: I underestimated the depth of the bench and the coach's ability to read a match. In chess, the same lesson applies to buyers: underestimating an experienced author's capacity to renew is a mistake, but overrating an advertising announcement is equally so. The balance lies in waiting for data. "Patience is not stillness. Patience is waiting for the opponent's pressing rhythm." For the endgame learner, patience means not buying the first product that appears on the homepage. It means waiting for independent reviews, for the price, and for clarity on who actually needs it. In chess, as in football, the smart buyer waits for the right rhythm. One more aspect deserves a look from the edge. Michael Kotyk, as a young trainer, represents an important transmission channel. Coaches promote products more effectively than advertising, because their students trust their choices. If Kotyk genuinely uses Endgame Academy in his teaching, that is a positive sign of pedagogical quality. If he appears only in a promotional video, that sign vanishes. The announcement leaves both possibilities open, which is why I do not rush to conclude. In the chess industry, educational products are usually judged on three layers: author, content, and platform. Müller stands firm on the first. His endgame content stands firm on the second, based on historical reputation. The third layer — the interactive platform — is the only unverified one. A poorly designed interactive feature may deliver no pedagogical benefit over a well-produced video. Quality of execution, not the existence of interactivity, is what decides. And here is the last point, and the most overlooked. Endgame Academy is not a standalone product. It is part of a broader platform. If users already pay for ChessBase software, integrated course access may add value at marginal cost. If users only have the web or the mobile app, interactive features may be limited. The announcement does not specify platform requirements, and that is a significant gap for ordinary buyers. An interactive product locked behind paid software has a lower reach ceiling than its appearance suggests. I am sixty-nine. I have spent most of my life watching how study systems restructure themselves. ChessBase does nothing wrong in re-releasing a legacy. But a legacy only lives when it is verified again by people outside the advertising machine. What is worth watching in the coming weeks is not the product, but the response from the independent chess community. If true verifiers appear, we will know whether the new Endgame Academy is a step forward or merely a repackaging. And as in every endgame, the answer comes not from the most beautiful move, but from the most patient one.