The Chess Knowledge You Can Buy, and the Chess Knowledge You Lose

At two in the morning in Saint Petersburg, a name surfaces on the laptop screen: Bent Larsen. The Dane who spent the 1960s hammering at the Soviet wall of chess, who fought less with Tal than with his own nerve. The headline says his strategy can be learned. Yet in the fourteen information points that follow, Larsen appears nowhere — not one game, not one move, not one idea.

Either this is legacy series branding, editorial laziness, or a square left empty in the very naming of the package placed before the reader. On sixty-four squares, an empty square is never harmless — it is either a trap or a mistake. And in the ledger of chess journalism, that empty square is today's real story. When an institution that has sold chess knowledge as a product for four decades lets the distance between its headline and its contents widen, that is not a marketing slip. It is a portrait of a system.

Because this issue is not news. It is advertising — the publisher's own copy for its own product. Yet, read correctly, such advertising is among the most honest documents of our time. It shows where chess knowledge is now made, who makes it, and who can afford to buy it.

What is actually inside

ChessBase Magazine #225 — another issue in the German house's familiar cadence. Inside: analysis of the Chess Festival Prague 2026, in which active elite players annotate their own games — Aravindh, Anish Giri, Ediz Gurel, David Navara. A separate special section: twenty-seven miniatures. Opening videos presented by Jan Werle, Daniel King and Robert Ris. Ten opening articles. And three trainers — tactics, strategy, endgame.

Multi-format delivery: download, PDF, printed booklet, and the ChessBase Book for iPad and tablet. Two target audiences — club players and professionals.

Notice: there is no result here, no rating, no scoreboard. Who won Prague, who lost, how many points — not a line. Each of the four annotators is only a byline, only a name. Which game, which moment, which mistake — the publisher deliberately withholds it. This is no accident. It is a conscious strategy for protecting the product's capital. Knowledge is sold first, shown second.

The market nobody watches

Chess is a game, but chess knowledge is a market. And two models stand at its two ends.

On one side, ChessBase — the old sentry, the regular issue, curated knowledge, the stamp of elite names. On the other, Chess.com and Lichess — free, daily, hourly, an ocean of thousands of games. The analysis a club player gets for nothing today, fifteen years ago would have required sitting in a library. Yet ChessBase survives, for one reason only: authority. World-class players analysing their own games — that sentence cannot be bought, cannot be faked, and that sentence is the spine of the whole business.

But a spine has a price, and it is not counted in money but in time. To put a Giri or a Navara beside the board and produce analysis is to buy the time of active stars. When they play less, when they turn from media, the supply itself will run short. The core raw material of the product is perishable.

And here a subtler question appears. Free platforms move fast; ChessBase cannot match that speed — and does not want to. It has bet on depth. But depth only has value when the reader is willing to give time. And the reader's time is now the scarcest resource of all. So the real fight is not volume versus authority. It is time versus patience.

Opening theory: the flagship currency

Notice who gets the most space in this issue — the opening. Ten articles, three videos, a conspicuous share. That is not a coincidence.

In the engine era, every phase of chess has become calculable, but the opening is the only phase where preparation must be rewritten daily. In the middlegame you think at the board; in the opening you think at home, before the board. And that home thinking is what can be bought, sold in bulk, distributed from club to professional. Opening theory is now the most expensive currency in chess knowledge, because it is the only currency that must be reprinted every day.

The videos by Daniel King or Robert Ris are not merely teaching material. They announce a specific model — presenter-driven chess. People trust people more than lines. What the engine says, a trainer can say too; but the engine does not tell you which line is relevant to you. That judgement of what matters is the presenter's true product.

Still, an unease remains. Ten articles and three videos — that ratio reveals that chess teaching still runs on the same old assumption: more knowledge means more lines. Yet modern preparation is not the game of remembering lines; it is the game of discarding them. Which line will I not study, which will I throw away — that is today's real skill. Material that teaches you what to add but never what to cut leaves you half-way.

Two pitches of one ledger

I have watched chess from two pitches. In Moscow, where chess is a profession — schools, salaries, coaches, and a seven-year-old placed in a neighbourhood club so the game is taken seriously. And in Dhaka, where the federation runs on roughly eleven lakh taka a year — less than a single franchise cricketer's bat-sponsorship deal.

ChessBase Magazine is, in effect, the commercial version of the Moscow model. The Soviet Union bound chess knowledge into a state system; ChessBase bound it into a market system. Both do the same work — institutionalise knowledge, make it continuous, make it cumulative. Dhaka has neither. And that is the centre of my interest.

Based on years of sitting beside the board, I can say with certainty that chess is not a problem of poverty. It is a problem of employment. Bangladesh has produced no new grandmaster for more than seventeen years — because sixty-four squares do not feed a household, while engineering does. The parent who steers a child away from the board and toward a computer is not selling out a culture; that parent is making a rational financial call. And that call turns crueller precisely when the market for chess knowledge itself becomes an expensive, centralised, unsubsidised product.

Picture a thirteen-year-old in Chittagong who wants material like ChessBase Magazine. He must buy it. His father must buy it. Yet for a thirteen-year-old in Moscow it is part of the school curriculum — the state buys it. Knowledge is not equal; the door to knowledge is not equal. And in a game where knowledge is the only asset, that inequality is the real gap.

I grew up inside that fracture. In the late 1980s, when chess was still print-only, a teenager from Dhaka became South Asia's first grandmaster — a full year before India's. I wrote then, in newsprint ink. Today I think: from that moment the two countries took two roads. India built a machine — academies, coaches, competition, scholarships. We built a statue — a name, a pride, a memory. Statues are worshipped; pipelines are not built. And now, when a twenty-two-year-old becomes national champion undefeated, and a fifty-one-year-old former champion takes his seventh title, I read both as two pages of one ledger — the hope, and the bill for thirty lost years between them.

The name that sells, the name that teaches

Now to an old truth everyone in chess knows and nobody says: opening an academy in a star's name and actually teaching are two different jobs. ChessBase uses star names as a seal of authority — clever business. But when teaching runs on a star's name, personality becomes the point and method is lost. And without method, no country produces grandmasters in the long run — stars leave one day.

That is exactly Bangladesh's problem. We had stars — Niaz Murshed, Rani Hamid, Ziaur Rahman. But because we had stars, we assumed we had a system. We did not. Moscow built a system; we built a statue. And the price is still being counted — every new talent who chooses engineering, every norm tournament that shuts, every coach who leaves for another profession.

One thing must be clear. I am not blaming ChessBase. Whatever the quality of what it sells, it answers a demand created by club players in rich countries. The fault belongs to a system in which knowledge is a purchased thing, and a country that cannot buy it also fails to build the capacity to produce it. Without both together, no chess nation holds.

The story nobody saw

Now the counter-intuitive truth this issue whispers to me. Everyone assumes elite institution means elite control. ChessBase means authority, ChessBase means rigour. Yet in this issue's very headline sits an empty square — Bent Larsen's name with no trace of Larsen. Once is an accident; but in publishing this kind of name-drifting recurs, because a brand lives on faith in itself rather than on its contents. When authority becomes habit, it stops asking to be checked.

Here is my real objection. ChessBase's true asset is not its star annotators — in the engine era the gap between a grandmaster's evaluation and an engine's is shrinking daily. The real asset is the editor who decides which game is worth printing, which idea matters, which will waste the reader's time. That judgement is irreplaceable, and it is the least discussed.

But this is also the danger. The biggest risk to an institution that sells authority is not an outside competitor — it is its own internal slackening. When template language — outstanding, first-class, exciting — returns issue after issue, it signals that the house is no longer excited by its product, only surviving on its own rhythm. The trust ChessBase earned over four decades is its greatest capital — and now its least examined liability.

I say this not as a rival. I say it because I know this strand of chess journalism will not arrive in Bangladesh one day soon — because we still lack an editorial culture like ChessBase's. A country that does not preserve its own players' games will live, in the future, on knowledge preserved by others. That is dependence, not independence.

The sum nobody adds up

The pitch remembers what the camera missed.

Twenty-seven miniatures — this number is not a gentleman's list; it is a market demand sheet. Short, bloody, quick games, because they take less time and deliver more thrill. What the reader wants, the publisher sells. And here is the hard truth: chess knowledge also lives by the rules of entertainment. When deep instruction and quick thrill are sold in the same package, depth usually yields to spectacle.

Two pitches, one year, and the quiet math of belonging.

I heard that sum twice in 2026. In June, my own city hosted the football World Cup — eleven cities, fan zones, eighty-thousand-seat stadiums. In September, in Batumi, the Chess Olympiad — more than 180 federations and almost no cameras. The loud one needed no poet. The quiet one did.

The final ledger

Chess knowledge is splitting into two tiers — one free, vast, daily volume; the other bought, curated, slowly authoritative. The question is not which survives; both will. The question is whether the second tier becomes a closed club.

Because if the best chess knowledge becomes ever more centralised, expensive and locked behind a subscription wall, then the country standing outside that wall — Bangladesh, for instance — will lose not only players but the language of the game itself. And then no one will reconcile the count of seventeen lean years, because keeping that ledger will be nobody's job.

In 2026, at the World Cup in Tbilisi, I listened to a schoolteacher from Khulna ask why a king can never be captured. Today I want to turn the question back to readers: if we cannot keep chess knowledge alive, what exactly will we leave the next generation? A board? A statue? Or a ledger nobody knows how to read?