ChessBase, Kostya Kavutskiy and the Battle for Chess Instruction Content

The person assigned to review ChessBase's two newest courses is a club player. Jochen Schwarz, whom ChessBase calls a "connoisseur," sat down to examine two products titled "Mastering Calculation" and "The Fundamentals of Positional Play" by Kostya Kavutskiy, placing them beside the established courses of Robert Ris and Ivan Sokolov. The review runs in multiple parts; the second covers openings, calculation, and strategic thinking. Across the entire text, not one engine variable, not one ACPL figure, not one sample game. The only thing weighed is the author's reputation and the buyer's value. FritzTrainer is ChessBase's flagship product line — a series of video and software courses fronted by named authors. It is the company's commercial backbone, running alongside its tournament coverage. When ChessBase adds Kostya Kavutskiy to its author roster, it does two things at once: it expands the catalogue and signs a face that already has followers. Kavutskiy is an International Master, a FIDE-certified trainer, and an established author. He comes from the content orbit of Chess.com and Chessable, the larger ecosystem of the direct rival. In Kavutskiy's file there is not a single rating figure. No games, no tournaments, no recent competitive results. His entire value rests on teaching skill. This "player — coach — content creator" type is becoming a pillar of the chess economy, and commercially it can matter more than a 2600 Grandmaster. I still tell young editors: "Esports and elite football differ only by the screen; the operating system is identical." The chess content market runs exactly that way. Product, platform, creator, exclusivity contract — all follow a template long established in the sports industry. The club-player market is the real commercial engine of chess instruction. Beginners and amateur players pay to improve in small steps; top Grandmasters rarely buy basic courses. Kavutskiy's two new courses aim straight at that engine. The notable part lies elsewhere. The two courses target the two most basic skill pillars: calculation and positional thinking. These are categories commercialized to the point of saturation. A course titled "Fundamentals" declares its segment by itself: beginners and club players who want to improve. That is the largest paying market, and also the most fiercely contested. Robert Ris and Ivan Sokolov are the reference points. Both already have extensive catalogues covering exactly the topics Kavutskiy has just entered: openings, calculation, positional play. That the review places the new product beside the old shows insiders treat them as substitutes for one another. In a dense catalogue, differentiation does not come from new chess knowledge, because basic chess knowledge is teachable by anyone. It comes from teaching persona and the support bundled with it. Everything on the board is data waiting for a reader — if you sit down. But a product catalogue is data too. And the data here whispers one thing: ChessBase is accepting the risk of internal cannibalization. When three authors sell courses on calculation and positional play on the same platform, buyers tend to pick one, and the others lose revenue. In publishing this is called product cannibalization — rarely discussed, genuinely costly. There is another, more positive reading. Inviting an author from a rival ecosystem shows ChessBase actively refreshing its roster. In the race for instructional-content share, Chess.com and Chessable still hold the platform-scale advantage. ChessBase responds by signing creative faces who already carry their own audiences. This is how a platform buys distribution, not merely content. Transfers are the only place where people pay for hope and then blame time. I wrote that for football, but it holds for every market of creative labour, chess included. ChessBase is paying for the hope that Kavutskiy's personal brand will pull learners its way. Time will judge, and time is not gentle. Pedri existed before Euro 2026, but most of us only saw him after the spreadsheet spoke. The same principle applies to the author market: real value usually appears before the market prices it. Kavutskiy was priced the moment he appeared, and that makes ChessBase's investment more expensive in expectation. The paradox sits with the reviewer's position. Schwarz is a club player, not a Grandmaster. That sounds credible: a real learner reviewing a product for real learners. But that same position turns every judgement about professional quality into opinion rather than verification. No engine cross-check, no games to measure, and course quality reduces to impression. I have seen a similar argument in football. In 2026, I sat in the commentary box in Nizhny Novgorod and put out a figure on the French midfield's pressing time. The audience could not see the screen, but the figure stood because it was measurable. A claim about course quality has no equivalent measurement. It floats between praise and trust. The "Part 2" structure deserves notice too. A review running several instalments, placing new products beside old ones, can read as a soft marketing device. The line between independent review and content advertising keeps blurring. That is an editorial question worth raising rather than hiding. The FIDE name here plays the role of commercial currency. The "FIDE trainer" title and the IM title are used as quality guarantees, detached from competitive results. In the content market, a title is worth far more than a results sheet, because course buyers learn to trust the signature, not the Elo. The biggest risk to this model comes from technological substitution, not direct rivals. Paid courses compete with free content on video-sharing platforms and with AI coaching assistants. When basic knowledge becomes freely accessible, a course's value lies in what is hard to copy: direct feedback, personalized paths, certification, and community. The teacher's persona is the last defence, and the most easily breached. I no longer believe in miracles on the pitch; I believe only in conversion rates. In the instructional content market, that conversion rate is the share of learners who finish a course and return to buy the next. The review does not supply that number. It supplies only an invitation. So the question I keep for next season is not how good Kavutskiy's courses are. It is whether a legacy platform can beat a scale platform by buying human personality, when that very personality is what technology is learning to imitate fastest. Method: this article draws on the multi-part ChessBase review of the FritzTrainer courses, combined with observation of the chess instruction content market. Claims about sales and product reception are noted as inference, not verified data.