25 Years of One Endgame: Karsten Müller, ChessBase, and How the Vietnamese Learn to Wait

In Nha Trang, my summer chess class has only nine students, and the youngest is seven. That afternoon, the boy sat in front of an endgame position: a king and one white pawn against a black king. He moved his king up, pulled it back, then moved it again. Fifteen minutes passed, his face reddened, and I recognised something familiar — every child in Vietnam knows a few dozen openings by heart, but in the endgame they freeze. The pawn never promotes, the king never takes the opposition, and a position that should be won is dragged into a real draw.

That evening I opened my computer and read a short piece from ChessBase. The name Karsten Müller appeared again, after all these years. ChessBase has released a new edition of its Endgame Academy, beginning with Müller's Checkmate & Pawn Endgames course. In the announcement, a young man named Michael Kotyk — introduced as a young Hamburg chess trainer — said he had examined the product as if through a magnifying glass. I read that line and thought of the seven-year-old outside, who has never heard of Müller, and who will likely never afford the fee for his course.

In the age of the 30-second video, I once spent three months listening to a man talk about the 400 metres of 2026. This time, one evening was enough to understand that an endgame can teach us more than a flashy opening.

ChessBase was founded in 2026 in Hamburg by Frederic Friedel and Matthias Wüllenweber. Over nearly four decades it has become a strange piece of infrastructure for the chess world: not a federation, not a tournament, but a place where the memory of the sport is stored as a database. Every game, every move from major events flows into it, and people consult it the way they consult a library. One of the figures most tightly bound to the final part of that memory — the endgame — is Karsten Müller, born in 2026, also in Hamburg.

Müller is famous in an unusual way. He never won the world championship and never was a star of super-tournaments. His reputation comes from the Endgame Corner column he has written for ChessBase since the early 2000s, and from Fundamental Chess Endings, co-authored with Frank Lamprecht — a book many coaches still keep by their bedside. Across a lifetime, Müller chose to stand in the part of the board few want to watch: the phase where pieces are sparse, time has run out, and mistakes cannot be repaired.

The new edition of the Endgame Academy, with its Checkmate & Pawn Endgames course, marks roughly twenty-five years of relationship between Müller and ChessBase. That is the milestone the announcement invokes with the phrase 25 years ago. The product consists of interactive endgame lessons, designed so that the learner must move the pieces personally and take responsibility at the board, rather than passively watching a video. Kotyk, as reviewer, stresses that interactive options have now become indispensable in video courses.

WHY THE ENDGAME IS WHERE PEOPLE ARE SORTED

Openings can be memorised. A ten-year-old in Hanoi can recall the first twenty moves of a Sicilian system and play like a machine. The endgame does not permit memorisation, because it has no trodden path. There is only the king, a few pieces, and a single question: is this move accurate? The endgame is a test of character, not of memory. It measures long-range calculation and the capacity to endure boredom — two things every sports education preaches but few actually teach.

Müller's choice to begin with pawns and checkmates is not accidental. Pawn endgames are the technical foundation of everything else: without understanding king and pawn, one cannot understand why a queen traded for two pieces wins or loses. Checkmate is the smallest brick in the wall. A programme that starts there shows the designer is thinking about the learner's progress, not about selling something glamorous. In forty-nine years of watching chess, I have seen too many courses open with their most exciting lines and end with the learner abandoning them.

The difficulty of the endgame lies in the absence of applause. When a foreign player calculates a good plan twenty moves deep, the hall is silent. When a young Vietnamese player stands before a king-versus-king position, no ovation awaits. A record never grows old; it simply waits for someone who knows how to listen. And the endgame is the quietest record of all.

MÜLLER AND THE KIND OF SPECIALIST THE CHESS MARKET PRODUCES

Chess has two kinds of famous people. The first wins tournaments, appears on magazine covers, signs sponsorship deals. The second wins little of note but leaves behind a body of knowledge that others must consult whenever a difficult position appears. Karsten Müller belongs to the second kind, and that kind lasts longer.

His specialisation is a phenomenon worth analysing. While most grandmasters produce broad content from opening to middlegame, Müller chose to dig deep into a field the public finds dry. That choice has a cost: a narrower audience, less glamour. It also has a reward: a reputation that cannot be replaced. When a coach needs to teach a student rook endgames, there are not many names to choose from. That is a soft monopoly, built by time rather than advertising.

In Vietnam we have great names such as Lê Quang Liêm and Nguyễn Ngọc Trường Sơn, both grandmasters who have crossed the 2700 Elo mark — a figure enough to place them among the world elite. But their careers are tied to the arena, not to systematising endgame knowledge for later generations. That is the gap. A chess nation strong at the competitive level but weak at transmitting knowledge will always import its textbooks and pay in foreign currency for what it could write itself.

Müller is the model Vietnamese chess should follow methodologically: choose a narrow field, dig to the bottom, and turn it into an asset. We have the data — thousands of games by domestic players across generations. What is missing is someone willing to sit down, classify, and write.

FROM PASSIVE VIEWING TO TAKING THE PIECES: AN INEVITABLE SHIFT

The most interesting point in the ChessBase announcement is not the content but the format. Bringing interactive exercises into a video course reflects a shift that has already happened across online education: learners no longer want to sit and listen, they want to try.

Interactivity in chess learning has become a minimum standard, no longer a competitive advantage. Free platforms such as Lichess and Chess.com have long offered vast endgame exercise libraries, letting users solve thousands of positions at no cost. When a paid product says it is interactive, one must ask further: to what degree, and at what quality. A well-designed exercise differs from one inserted to fill a quota.

From the perspective of a documentary maker, this shift mirrors what happened to televised sport. Audiences today will not accept a one-way broadcast. They want another camera angle, live statistics alongside, the ability to ask their own questions. Chess education is walking the same road, only a few years behind.

Based on my experience watching matches and training sessions, I would argue that the real value of an interactive endgame course lies not in the number of exercises but in the quality of feedback. When a learner makes a wrong move, they need to know why it is wrong and what is right. A system that only marks right or wrong without explaining produces players with good reflexes but no understanding.

THE ECONOMY OF AN ENDGAME

There is an economic reason the endgame is an attractive field for content investment. Openings go stale quickly. An opening line once in fashion can be overturned by engine analysis within months, making an entire course obsolete. The endgame is different: the principles of king and pawn do not change. An endgame text written correctly can serve for decades.

That explains why ChessBase chose to celebrate a twenty-five-year milestone with Müller rather than push a new opening set. This is a long-life asset, with stable margins and little technological risk. In the chess education market, the endgame is the least volatile terrain.

But long life has a downside. A product promoted through twenty-five years of memory raises the question of how much it truly innovates, or whether it merely re-dresses old content. For someone who bought Müller's earlier courses, familiarity can be a plus. For a newcomer, it can signal a reissue rather than a breakthrough.

WHERE VIETNAM STANDS ON THIS MAP

Vietnamese learners face a paradox. They can access the world's best material with one click, but two walls block them: language and cost. Most of Müller's deep content, and that of most international chess experts, exists only in English or German. An eighth-grader in Nha Trang can read chess notation but cannot read the explanations.

Cost is the second wall. A paid course priced in euros can equal several weeks of wages for a family working the sea. Meanwhile, free platforms offer endgame exercises but lack systematic guidance. Vietnamese learners are forced to choose between the cheap-but-fragmented and the good-but-expensive.

That gap is an opportunity. A group of Vietnamese coaches with sufficient expertise could write an endgame curriculum in Vietnamese, drawing on games played at home, and publish it online at low cost. I once followed a small project in central Vietnam: a few young coaches translated and adapted basic endgame exercises for their students. No sponsor, no publicity, yet the students improved markedly within a year.

A CONTRARIAN VIEW: NOSTALGIA CAN BE A TRAP

One thing is easily overlooked when reading announcements like this. The promotional text is written by the seller, and the praise for the product comes from a figure whose independence has not been verified. The phrase 25 years ago is an emotional hook, not evidence of quality. Buyers should distinguish between two things: Müller's twenty-five-year career, and the actual value of the new course.

The greatest risk of a personal brand is that it depends on one person. If Müller stops writing, or if the new content fails to maintain his standard, the whole ChessBase endgame line wobbles. Free resources such as Lichess do not depend on any single individual — they are a continuously updating community. In the long run, open structures endure better than closed ones, even if closed structures can be more refined at a given moment.

It must also be said plainly that not every reissue is an innovation. Adding interactive features is a necessary condition, but it does not automatically create pedagogical value. A course with poorly designed interactive exercises can be worse than a carefully written endgame book, because it creates the feeling of having learned without real understanding. For Vietnamese, who often study through translations and photocopied material, this caution matters even more.

And there is one more point rarely mentioned. In the chess world, the endgame is often treated as the work of those not yet good enough, rather than the work of the serious. A young player may spend hundreds of hours on openings to impress, but only a few on the endgame — the phase that decides most real games. If a course by Müller only makes people pay a little more attention to the endgame, it has done some good. But if it convinces them that buying the course is enough, it does harm.

EVERY ENDGAME IS A FRAGMENT OF PUBLIC MEMORY

I once spent nearly a year reconstructing the story of a female track athlete erased from an Olympic roster because of an administrative error. During that work, I realised that sport stores memory in two very different ways. The first is through medals and record tables — things recorded but easily forgotten. The second is through technique and method — things without glory that nonetheless pass from generation to generation.

An endgame belongs to the second kind. It has no audience, no medal, no name on a golden board. Yet it holds the way people have thought across generations. When Müller teaches about king and pawn, he passes on a fragment of the chess world's memory — a memory that, if no one writes it down, will vanish with those who hold it.

The stadium is empty, yet the applause of 2026 still echoes in every old record. So too does the endgame board. No one claps when the king takes the opposition, but that moment still stands there, waiting for someone who comes later to understand it.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS NOT THE PRODUCT

In the end, the value of the new Endgame Academy edition is decided not by the product itself but by how it is used. With the same course, one person can become a solid endgame player; another merely adds an item to a digital library. The difference lies in whether the learner is willing to sit at a real board, move each move, and accept boredom.

In Nha Trang, I will still open the summer chess class with nine students. I do not have the money to buy courses for them, and perhaps I do not need to. What I can do is print out basic endgame positions, place them on the table, and stay silent so the children find the move themselves. The process is slow, but it is real. And in an age when everything wants to be fast, teaching a child to wait may be a greater gift than any course.

The endgame does not change with technology. It only waits for a learner patient enough to understand it. Karsten Müller has spent twenty-five years writing about exactly that. The rest belongs to those who sit down at the board.