ChessBase and the Endgame Academy: Karsten Müller, 25 Years and the Last Pawns

There is a moment every chess player who has ever sat at a board remembers: when only a few pawns remain, and the two kings quietly step square by square. No cheering, no clock racing — only the silence of a position waiting to be solved. I have spent hours over positions like that at a small chess club on Nguyễn Chí Thanh Street in Đà Nẵng, watching a young student push his seventh pawn to the final rank and then freeze, unsure what to promote it into. That very end — the place outsiders think the story is over — is where everything begins. Karsten Müller has spent his career showing people exactly that. On August 14, 2026, ChessBase announced a new edition of its Endgame Academy — the company's academy devoted to endgames — together with the Checkmate & Pawn Endgames course authored by Karsten Müller. The information fits in a few lines: Müller is an endgame expert recognized across the chess world; his courses for ChessBase have become classics in the company's training catalogue; and this time the content has been redesigned toward interactivity, meaning learners must move the pieces and solve positions themselves instead of watching video and nodding along. What stands out is the name of the announcement itself: "25 years ago." It is ChessBase's way of recalling a long road tied to Müller, perhaps counted from the first Endgame Corner analysis columns he wrote for the company in the early 2000s. A quarter of a century is long enough for a column to become a legacy — and long enough for people to ask: is this a new product, or a new coat of paint on old content? The person handed the magnifying glass to scrutinize the product is Michael Kotyk, a young chess trainer in Hamburg. That ChessBase let a young outsider to the production team review its own course is a notable choice: it creates a sense of independent verification, though in the end Kotyk is still speaking within the frame of a product introduction released by the company itself. The first thing I want to discuss is why endgames were chosen as the starting point. In chess, the endgame is the least glamorous phase. The opening has theory updated every week; the middlegame has combinations beautiful as cinema. The endgame has only bare truths: the king must move first, pawns must promote, and a single square can decide an entire game. Pawn endgames are the technical foundation of every player, and also where people lose most often through mistakes that look trivial. Watch a club player handle a king-and-pawn ending and you instantly know how well they have been trained. That is why putting Checkmate & Pawn Endgames at the front of the curriculum is pedagogically correct, not a marketing choice. The second part, and for me the more interesting one, is the shift toward interactivity. Ten years ago, a chess course almost meant a string of videos: the teacher talks, the student listens, the student takes notes. But endgames cannot be learned by listening. No one becomes good at endgames merely by watching someone solve a king-and-pawn position. You must move the pieces yourself, be wrong yourself, see your king slip one square so that a draw turns into a loss. ChessBase saying that interactivity has become indispensable in video courses is an indirect confession. It shows that even long-established educational publishers must bow to the new expectations of learners — people accustomed to interactive exercises, to solving rather than watching. I have a habit of reviewing recordings of my own commentary. In the 2026 Báo Thanh Niên U21 international match, I misread an opposing player's name three times in a row. Mistakes before the microphone taught me that perfection is only a draft of sincerity. Since then I keep two notebooks side by side: one for verified facts, one for emotions. The same goes for an endgame course — the interactive part is the fact notebook, the place where a learner cannot fool himself into believing he understood. But stopping there would miss the most important point. Look at the gaps in the announcement. No price. No number of exercises. No length or detailed path. No third party confirmation beyond a young trainer invited by the company itself. What matters more is this: the online chess learning market has changed. A club player today can study endgames for free on Lichess, watch thousands of videos online, solve interactive exercises without spending a cent. So where does a paid ChessBase course stand? The likely answer lies in curation. Müller does not teach everything about endgames; he selects, arranges, and places the learner on a path. The value of a good teacher is not knowing more than the student, but knowing what the student should learn first and what later. Free is abundant; with a guide, there is a path. But that is precisely where the risk becomes clear: if the product is only old content repackaged with a new interactive interface, loyal learners have every right to feel they are paying for a memory rather than progress. The title "25 years ago" is both a medal and a reminder that the past is being laid out before our eyes. The microphone does not make the storyteller. It is the silence of the stands that signs every line. And in chess, the most valuable silence lies in the last pawns on the board. Sport does not promise victory; it only promises a heartbeat brave enough to continue. If the new Endgame Academy truly teaches people to see squares they once overlooked, then Karsten Müller's 25 years are not a number to commemorate — but a promise still being kept.