Karsten Müller and the Endgame Academy: Twenty-Five Years for the Final Move

The finest game I have followed in more than twenty years in this trade contained no sacrifice worth putting on the front page. It lasted nearly seven hours. By move forty, only a king, a rook and a few lonely pawns remained. The commentary booth fell silent. The co-host beside me began talking about other things, the schedule, the weather, an anecdote or two. Viewers drifted away one by one, like empty seats slowly appearing on a stand no one remembers. Then, on move sixty-three, a single pawn crept forward one square. The board seemed to wake. That moment, small, quiet, almost invisible to the naked eye, is what bound me to chess for good. Not the fiery combinations of the opening, not the beautiful sacrifices. But the endgame. The phase most spectators have already abandoned, and the one in which a player's dignity shows most clearly. I tell this story to arrive at an event that perhaps only those inside chess would notice. On August 14, 2026, ChessBase announced a new edition of its Endgame Academy, with two opening courses authored by Karsten Müller, titled Checkmate and Pawn Endgames. Shortly afterward, a young Hamburg chess trainer named Michael Kotyk reviewed the whole product through a coach's eyes and published a detailed assessment, noting that interactive features have become indispensable in video courses. On its surface, this is product news. A press release in the guise of an article. But sit with it long enough and something larger appears: the story of twenty-five years one man has given to the final moves, the way chess teaches patience, and whether a commercial product can touch the deepest layer of a player's thinking. I once commentated chess for VTC for two years, back when every final was a ritual. In those sessions I learned something no classroom teaches: spectators do not come to watch pieces move. They come to watch a person torn between two equally uncertain choices. And that only truly appears in the endgame, when everything has been stripped bare. To understand why this edition of ChessBase's product deserves writing about, I need to step back a little, set it within the long current of modern chess, where the opening has become a vast shareable data pool and the endgame remains the place where personal character cannot be copied. Over roughly three decades, the opening has become a science. Computers memorise millions of games, young players learn lines to move thirty without understanding why. Specialised software means a fifteen-year-old in Binh Duong can access exactly the knowledge a top grandmaster uses. The advantage drifts elsewhere. More precisely, it drifts toward what libraries and machines cannot hand over: long calculation, endurance, and a particular kind of courage in the endgame. Meanwhile, the endgame is where we face ourselves. A lone king on a board offers no hiding place. No opening mystery, no elegant trap, no formation to create an illusion of safety. There is a pawn, it can win or it can draw, and the result depends on who thought more carefully, who conserved every square, who kept calm as the clock drained. That is why I have always regarded the endgame as the strictest discipline of all three phases. The board no longer protects mistakes. In the opening, we forget a line and call it a trial. In the middlegame, we misplace a piece and call it a bold idea. In the endgame, a wrong move is a wrong move. Nothing covers it. And that nakedness is what makes the endgame the place where we learn the most about ourselves. Karsten Müller does not appear as a glittering star. Born in 2026 in Hamburg, Germany, a grandmaster, his career was not built on trophies or spotlights. He entered chess history by a side path: becoming the world's foremost endgame expert, the name others invoke when they need a final-move explained. He writes books, columns and analysis, works with several publishers over many years, and quietly becomes the teacher of a generation. Within chess, to say Karsten Müller understands the endgame best is almost a statement needing no proof. His standing comes not from a single win but from decades of continuous, weekly, monthly, yearly analysis. He does not set trends. He sets the safety net for learners. That is perhaps why ChessBase has stayed with him so long, across a span the company now calls, in this new edition, twenty-five years ago. I thought about that reading the announcement. Twenty-five years. In a sport where generations roll by like waves, twenty-five years between one author and one platform is a number that made me pause. It may be homage. It may also be a way of anchoring memory, a way of saying: we and this teacher are still here. But looking closer at the product, the point worth discussing is not the number twenty-five. It is how he teaches. The first two courses in the new edition are Checkmate and Pawn Endgames. These are the first bricks of a house. Pawn endings are the spine of all endgame technique, because most other endings eventually reduce to them. Checkmate is the breath of chess, the reason all pieces exist on the board, the moment when every buried calculation is paid for right or wrong. Choosing these two themes to open an academy shows an understanding of curriculum, not of sales. I must say something that may surprise many. A good chess academy is not measured by the beautiful combinations it teaches but by how it teaches the handling of the dullest positions. Checkmate and pawn endings are exactly those dull positions. They excite nobody. They make no viral videos. But they decide most clear outcomes. From my experience following matches, most amateur players drop half a point or a full point not because they are attacked in the middlegame, but because they mishandle an advantageous endgame. They turn a win into a draw, a draw into a loss, simply because they do not know how to press at the right moment. That is the most common disease of club chess. It is also the disease an endgame academy tries to cure. Michael Kotyk, who reviewed this product, is a young coach in Hamburg. This matters more than it appears. When a trainer, someone who day in and day out struggles to teach his students, rather than an academic critic or a professional player, reviews a course, it is a sign that the product targets the middle layer of chess: club players, local coaches, tutors in provincial towns. Not super grandmasters preparing for a world championship, but the very people on whom Asian chess results depend. And it is Kotyk's review that confirms something I have observed for years: interactive features have become indispensable in video courses, especially in chess, where passive viewing causes learners to forget almost everything soon after watching. This claim holds for online chess specifically and digital technical education in general. I once had a young student. Eleven years old, he sat for hours each morning before online chess lessons. He watched videos with a focused expression, nodding as if he understood everything. Then, in a real game, he repeated the same old mistake. Each time, I remembered the gap between watching and doing, the gap every educational product must cross. Video gives people the feeling of having learned. Only interaction turns that feeling into knowledge. When a learner is forced to choose a move, to take responsibility, to discover where he went wrong, a different process unfolds in the mind. Memory attaches to failure. The small pain of choosing badly makes one never forget. Here I see something common between teaching chess and teaching in general: what people learn is not the content, but the way they confront their own mistakes. And the endgame is the ideal environment for that kind of learning, because in the endgame there is time to see the consequences of each choice. If we strip the new edition of its marketing and look straight at its structure, we see ChessBase doing something I consider wise: merging two product lines that were previously separate. One is professional authority, with Karsten Müller and twenty-five years of reputation. The other is a modern interactive platform, where learning is no longer watching but doing. This combination is not technological innovation. It is the merging of a person and a craft. Over twenty-one years writing about chess, I have noticed a rule: successful chess products tend to rest on a specific individual, not a vague brand. Players buy a book because they trust the author. They pay for a course because they trust the teacher. This is precisely what makes Karsten Müller's personal standing an invisible but extremely valuable asset. He is not a new face. He is a face learners already trust and want to give more time to. I wonder where the limit of such a product lies. Must anything bearing Karsten Müller's name sell? Or only products that genuinely help people win more games survive long? The answer, perhaps, lies in whether a learner, after finishing the course, can recall and apply at least three crucial techniques in a game the following week. And here I must admit something harsh. I have watched very strong players, those who know endgame theory by heart, let victories slip before their eyes. They know the theory move by move, but under clock pressure, with an unflinching opponent across the board, that knowledge evaporates. What remains is character. And character is not contained in any video course. That is why I think that however celebrated the new edition may be, it is still only a necessary condition. The sufficient condition still lies with the learner, in whether he dares to sit for hundreds of hours with dull positions. I once spent sixty days with a recording, rewinding a missed shot from my childhood memory over and over. No software can shorten that span. Only patience, and a very private obsession. The board does not hold only pieces; it holds the calluses of a life. This does not diminish the product. It simply places it correctly: a companion on a long road, not a saviour. Learners of chess need to be reminded of that, lest they imagine a single course can change their level. There is another aspect I want to mention, perhaps the least discussed in the announcement. It is how a commercial chess product is positioned in today's learning market. Previously, to study the endgame, one had to hunt for books, translate material, piece together scattered knowledge. Today everything is packaged. That is convenient, but it creates a paradox: when everything is available, learners easily lose the habit of discovery. They become passive, waiting for a better product instead of digging deeper themselves. I have seen the number of serious chess learners grow enormously in twenty years. But the proportion who genuinely improve has not grown correspondingly. Abundant material can make learning easier, but it does not automatically make learners stronger. That is a truth anyone entering the chess education market should remember. In that context, a product like the Endgame Academy carries two responsibilities. As a product, it must attract buyers. As an academy, it must be honest with learners. And I believe that honesty is decided by what it does not promise: it does not promise to make you a master. It only promises to help you understand better what happens at the end of a game. Here I want to discuss something I consider the most notable point, and also the easiest to overlook. The way ChessBase's announcement frames the new edition as marking twenty-five years creates a very particular emotion: nostalgia. People do not buy an endgame course. They buy a piece of their own memory, of youthful evenings before a screen, of pages turned yellow. This works with those long accustomed to ChessBase. But there is a blind spot in the nostalgic approach. When a product relies on memory, it tends to romanticise the past. People easily assume the old was better, that earlier generations played chess more deeply, that today's products are merely copies of past glories. I have heard this many times in Vietnamese chess circles, especially from older players. They remember games when everything was slower, more manual, and claim today's convenience has stripped chess of its soul. I understand the feeling. But I do not agree with the conclusion. Today's young players may be stronger than players of the same age in earlier generations, partly because they have access to resources that did not exist. A twelve-year-old can download a course by Karsten Müller and begin learning things that decades ago required a trip abroad. This is real progress, undeniable. The danger of nostalgia lies not in honouring the past. It lies in making people think the future has no room for novelty. In chess this happens especially easily, since endgame principles have been understood for decades. People assume there is nothing left to explore, that one can only revise what is known. But Karsten Müller himself has proven the opposite throughout his career. His analyses of seemingly known endings have often uncovered new possibilities, overlooked defensive resources, subtle details nobody saw decades ago. He does not rediscover chess. He refines our understanding of it. And that refinement is progress. What can a new endgame course with interactive features offer that books from decades ago could not? The answer is not in the content. It is in how learners approach it. A position in a book requires the reader to set up the pieces, to think, to pay for mistakes. A position on an interactive platform pays the learner the right to err as quickly and directly as possible, with nowhere to hide. Seen this way, the Endgame Academy is not a digitised book. It is a new learning experience, and that is its true value. The nostalgic often speak of past generations with admiration. They recall the era of Fischer, the scarcity of books, the loneliness of study. And they claim that scarcity created strong people. Perhaps they are right. But perhaps they are only remembering a version of themselves, a young person who once sat for hours at a board, and assuming scarcity was a precondition for greatness. I do not believe so. Scarcity creates loneliness, not greatness. What creates greatness is the time one gives to a thing, whether or not it is available. In this era, when every resource is at hand, time remains the only thing money cannot buy. Age does not extinguish the love of chess; it only changes its colour. What I mean is this: a good product does not change the nature of learning. It merely makes the road to learning less obstructed. For a young person in Binh Duong, in Hanoi, in Can Tho, accessing an endgame course by Karsten Müller is an opportunity earlier generations lacked. But that opportunity becomes progress only if the learner dares to enter it, dares to sit for hundreds of hours with dull positions, dares to admit error and correct it. I hold that this is the crux every educational product must confront: it can only help those already ready to learn. For those who are not, it will be a trophy on a shelf, a thing to show one bought, an excuse not to truly study. Here I must add something less about chess and more about how we read a piece of news. Over years in this trade I have learned to distinguish a genuine review from one written by someone connected to the maker. This is not a matter of ethics but of method. When a reviewer is invited by the maker, he tends to look at strengths first, and limitations are presented as things to improve in future. When a reviewer is independent, he tends to look for weaknesses first, and strengths are noted as a surprise. Michael Kotyk is called a young coach. His relationship with ChessBase is unclear. He may be an independent user invited to share his view. He may have some partnership. Readers should find out for themselves before fully trusting a review. That is not suspicion. It is necessary caution in an increasingly complex information market. The same holds for other chess products. When a company introduces a product, it is under no obligation to list drawbacks. The reader must ask: how much does this course cost? How long is it? How many exercises? Are the exercises genuinely useful or merely eye-catching games? Such questions rarely get answered in a product announcement. I once wrote a critical review of another chess product and was challenged by some for being too harsh. But I believe that harshness is necessary. Chess consumers are usually not wealthy. They are club players spending a not-insignificant sum on a product they hope will help them improve. If we do not tell the truth about products, we deceive them. And the truth here is this: the new edition of the Endgame Academy, based on what has been published, appears to be a quality product. But a product's quality lies not only in itself, but in its user. If the user does not invest time, however good the product, the result will disappoint. There is a thing I have always found strange in chess, directly relevant to today's story. Chess is a sport considered to be for intelligent people. This is true. But intelligence is not the only condition for success. Patience, endurance, tolerance of boredom, and a ruthless honesty with oneself matter no less. And among sports, chess measures the gap between intelligence and endurance most clearly. I have met people of extraordinary intelligence, able to calculate in a flash, yet failing in long games. They lose patience. They lose focus. They think the game is won when only a few pieces remain. And their opponent, with a terrifying calm, turns the position into a draw. I have seen this many times. At every level. At every age. In every culture. In a sense, the endgame is a school for endurance. An endgame does not let us display intelligence through beautiful combinations. It forces us to prove patience through unremarkable moves. A king step forward. A pawn push. A rook shifting from one file to another, waiting. Thirty such moves in silence. And only on the thirty-first does an opportunity open, and the winner is the one who prepared for it from move twelve. This is what I always tell young players about the endgame: it is the study of preparation in silence. No spectators, no glory, no immediate recognition. Only quiet correctness. I remember an evening during the World Cup in Russia. That night I sat in Volgograd, not assigned a major match, so I chose to follow the Iceland fans in their game against Nigeria. Iceland lost two-nil, were eliminated, but fifteen thousand Icelanders in a forty-four-thousand-seat stadium still stamped and clapped the Viking rhythm for seven minutes after the final whistle. I wrote of them as lava flowing back into a volcano's mouth. It was the most beautiful defeat I have ever witnessed. The match ended, but the applause still rings in my memory. Years later I still recall that moment whenever I look at a lost endgame. There is dignity in fighting on when all is decided. There is beauty in patience amid despair. And the endgame is where that dignity shows most clearly, because there one cannot perform. Every piece is revealed. Every move is recorded. And the result is the final result. I do not say this to romanticise defeat. I know that defeat in the endgame is a real defeat with a real price. A point lost. A tournament dropped. An opportunity missed. I must remind myself of this each time I write about a lost game. Respect for the loser does not change the fact that someone lost. But in that loss one can learn more than in a win. Victory gives the feeling of having done right. Defeat forces one to look at what was done wrong. And the endgame is where the quietest defeats occur, the ones people carry in their hearts long after the game has closed. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to the endgame, and why I feel interested in a product that teaches it. Not because I think a course will make me an expert, but because I believe what it teaches is what life teaches: patience, preparation, honesty. I have read many chess products. I have been eager for courses promising to turn a beginner into a master in three months. I have been disappointed by products merely copying old content under a new name. But I have also met simple, effective products that promise little and keep their word. I do not know where the new edition of the Endgame Academy will sit among them. I have not had the chance to try it. But based on what has been published, I can say it is headed in the right direction. It chooses an important topic, a trustworthy teacher, and a learning format suited to the age. Together, these three form a solid foundation. But a solid foundation does not guarantee success. It only guarantees that if the product fails, the failure will not come from obvious causes. There is another aspect I want to raise, one less noticed but important for Vietnamese chess. In recent years Vietnamese chess has grown considerably. Young Vietnamese players increasingly appear on the international stage. But compared with strong chess nations, we still lack one thing: a systematic, deep, methodically delivered endgame training system. Most Vietnamese players study the endgame by reading books, replaying games, drawing conclusions alone. This produces independent players, but also knowledge gaps hard to fill. A product like the Endgame Academy can play a role in filling those gaps, especially if it is accessible in price and language. English is a barrier for many Vietnamese players. If the content has subtitles or translations, that is a big advantage. Even if it is English-only, access is still better than nothing. I know many young Vietnamese players have taught themselves by watching free or paid foreign courses, using the internet, using translators. They are people who dare to train themselves without a support system. And they are the ones best placed to make use of a product like the Endgame Academy. When there are no spectators, chess returns to the sound of its own breathing. Those young players play chess in silence. They have no stand, no applause, no admiring articles. They have a board, a screen, and a hunger. And if a product helps them improve one more step, that is a real contribution. That is why, despite my doubts about commercial products, I chose to write about this edition. Not to promote it, but to record a moment in the current of chess, when a teacher of twenty-five years' standing continues to teach the old things in a new way. I want to close with a thought I have carried a long time. In chess, as in life, people tend to prize the flashy moment. A smash, a sacrifice, a move that draws loud applause. But most of a player's life unfolds in silence, in phases no one watches, no one remembers. The endgame is the symbol of that silent part. And perhaps, for that very reason, having someone spend a career teaching it is something to be treasured. Karsten Müller is not as famous as the great players. He has no matches the media invokes. But what he does has its own life, a life as quiet as pawns advancing one square at a time toward the far end of the board. One day, one of those pawns will promote. And the one who promotes it may be anyone who once sat for hours before his pages. That is a kind of legacy chess needs more of. Not the legacy of victories, but of lessons handed down. Not the legacy of titles, but of silences filled with patience. Once you understand the endgame, you see chess differently. You no longer rush into attacks before you are ready. You learn to value the small move. You recognise that victory comes not from the moment but from accumulation. And you understand that a pawn, if patient enough, can become a queen. That is what anyone who studies the endgame learns, not only about chess, but about themselves.