ChessBase Adds Kostya Kavutskiy: Two New Courses and the Chess Content Race

In a reading room of a chess club in Saint Petersburg, I once sat beside a middle-aged man for three hours. He did not make a single move. He stared at the board, counted in his head, and jotted a few lines into a worn notebook. When I asked, he said he was training calculation — something, he believed, that cannot be bought, only gathered over the years. That story came rushing back when I read ChessBase's new review of two Kostya Kavutskiy courses, "Mastering Calculation" and "The Fundamentals of Positional Play." Someone is trying to sell the market exactly what that old man believed could not be sold. But the real story of this announcement lies elsewhere — in how a veteran chess publisher is trying to survive inside a content market transformed beyond easy recognition.

ChessBase is a long-established German publisher of chess software and content, known for its database and the FritzTrainer line — video courses written by named authors. In an announcement published on December 9, 2026, the company introduced two new courses by Kostya Kavutskiy, marking his first appearance in the FritzTrainer catalogue.

Kavutskiy is no stranger to followers of international chess. He is an International Master, a FIDE-recognised trainer, and an author with an established reputation. What stands out is how the announcement positions the product. The two courses are named after two skill pillars: calculation and positional play. They are not deep opening manuals, nor elite-level theory breakdowns. They aim straight at club players trying to improve — the largest and most consistently paying customer base in the market.

The reviewer is Jochen Schwarz, a club player described as a connoisseur. The review places Kavutskiy alongside two established authors of the same publisher, Robert Ris and Ivan Sokolov. This is the second instalment in a series — a small but telling detail, since multi-part series are usually the mark of a deliberately designed promotional campaign rather than a one-off appraisal.

One point must be made from the start: this announcement belongs to the product category, not the tournament category. There is no game, no score, no move-quality metric. It belongs to a different market — the instructional-content market, where a product is sold by the author's name rather than by playing strength.

And that is the real subject. The value of a chess author today lies not in competitive ranking but in the ability to sell knowledge to the mass of club players. Kavutskiy is not introduced by an Elo figure. He is introduced by his International Master title, his FIDE trainer certificate, and his authorial reputation. All three are commercial currency, not board results.

Based on my years of tracking the chess content market, there is a familiar paradox few care to name. An International Master can monetise far better than many a 2600-rated Grandmaster. The reason is simple: the people who pay for courses are not the grandmasters, but the hundreds of thousands of club players who want to lose less often. To them, a good teacher matters more than a strong player. Titles open doors, but the ability to communicate is what keeps learners inside.

Kavutskiy's arrival at ChessBase also marks a notable talent flow between platforms. He had been attached to the content ecosystem of Chess.com and Chessable — platforms larger in author scale. His move to ChessBase shows the German company actively recruiting creative personalities who already carry an audience. In other words, it buys content, and buys the viewers along with it.

This reflects a broader industry trend: chess content is shifting from anonymous products to personality-bound products. A course once could sell on theoretical quality alone. Now buyers want to know who is teaching, how that person speaks, whether they can be trusted. Personality has become the last defence of paid content.

But that defence faces a real threat. The two topics Kavutskiy chose — calculation and positional play — are precisely the most heavily commoditised areas, and precisely the areas where artificial intelligence can now supply enough for free. Modern analysis tools have replaced much of the dry calculation that learners once had to grind out alone. So where does the added value of a course lie? ChessBase's apparent answer is: in the person behind the course.

There is a rarely discussed risk, and to me the most worrying one: internal cannibalisation. By teaching calculation and positional play, Kavutskiy competes directly with the same publisher's veteran authors, Ris and Sokolov, who already have courses in exactly these areas. Adding a new author may expand the catalogue, but it may also overshadow older products. That is a catalogue-management problem, not a chess problem.

In a field I have followed, people often say age does not decide creative power. Esports taught me that youth lies not in muscle but in the reflex of the heart. For chess, the definition of "new" is shifting in the same direction: a new author is not necessarily a young one, but one with fast reflexes for the content market.

The counter-intuitive angle is this. The chess world is celebrating a growth story, yet its essence is a defensive transaction.

When a platform recruits an author who already has followers, it is not a sign of abundance but of fierce competition. ChessBase is not buying novel content — it is buying a distribution channel. If new content were truly the deciding factor, there would be no need to place Kavutskiy beside Ris and Sokolov for comparison. The very act of comparison shows these are substitute products in an already crowded catalogue.

The deeper blind spot lies in the belief that skill can be packaged. A club player buys a calculation course hoping to buy calculation ability. But calculation, in the end, is the product of thousands of hours of solo practice, not of ten hours of video. A course can point the way, but it cannot walk it for you. That is why the instructional-content market always sells, and always disappoints — at the same time. The day my heart stopped beating, I learned to beat slower but deeper; the chess learner is the same, needing to slow down rather than buy more speed.

One accuracy note is warranted: the announcement uses a date format that confuses US and European conventions, and the timestamp appears future-dated. Before using it as a market milestone, it should be verified. For a product announcement, a date error is no small matter, because it shapes how we read the entire timeline.

The transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope. The chess course market runs on exactly that principle, differing only in currency: here, knowledge is sold to buy progress. What remains open is whether a magnetic author can replace the silent hours at the board — or merely make buyers forget that time is the only teacher that sells nothing at all.