ChessBase 26

Matthias Wuellenweber reveals features

At the core of ChessBase 26 lies the completely reimagined Opening Report. A tool that turns your repertoire work into a guided journey through ideas. It now highlights the most instructive games, extracts typical plans and manoeuvres, and identifies recurring tactical motifs directly from millions of games in the Mega Database. This allows you to understand openings rather than memorize them, training your intuition with real examples from top-level play.

One of the most exciting insights from this new system is that openings can’t be judged universally.

What fails at grandmaster level can still score brilliantly for club players! 

ChessBase 26 lets you explore these rating-specific truths, giving practical players the confidence to rediscover classic or unconventional systems such as the Stonewall, the Scandinavian, or even old gambits that have proven success in their own rating range.

The Fashion Index adds another fascinating layer, showing which openings are currently trending, how long they stay popular, and why certain lines fade away. It even identifies the pioneers who first played and developed them - whether it’s the Evans gambit or Botvinnik’s system in the Slav - offering a historical storytelling element that connects modern play with chess tradition.

Equally innovative is the new Monte Carlo Analysis, a feature that brings a fresh scientific dimension to chess evaluation. By running thousands of ultra-fast games in parallel on all CPU cores, ChessBase 26 reveals winning probabilities, draw ratios, and typical piece manoeuvres, offering a much richer picture of a position than a single 0.00 engine score ever could.

Behind all these innovations stands Matthias Wüllenweber’s long-standing vision: to combine powerful technology with real chess understanding. ChessBase 26 makes full use of today’s multicore processors, ensuring even complex analyses and data searches run faster than ever.

Whether you are a grandmaster refining your repertoire, a club player discovering new attacking ideas, or a coach building lessons for your students, ChessBase 26 offers a vibrant, modern, and intelligent way to study chess - one that reflects Wuellenweber’s philosophy:

Preparation should not just be about numbers, but about learning to think like a chess player.

• 0:00 — ChessBase 26: It’s Happening!
• 0:30 — Why Jump from 18 to 26?
• 1:00 — The New Opening Report
• 2:50 — Tactical Motifs Turned Into Training
• 3:30 — What Works at Your Level
• 4:07 — Stonewall, Scandinavian & Gambits
• 6:57 — How to find a fashionable opening?
• 8:34 — The Storytelling of Chess Openings
• 10:47 — Monte Carlo Analysis Explained
• 12:10 — How It Works Technically
• 13:34 — Hardware Requirements
• 15:30 — Wuellenweber’s Favourite Feature

ChessBase '26 - Premium Package

EXPAND YOUR CHESS HORIZONS
Data, plans, practice – the new Opening Report In ChessBase there are always attempts to show the typical plans of an opening variation. In the age of engines, chess is much more concrete than previously thought. But amateurs in particular love openings with clear plans, see the London System. In ChessBase ’26, three functions deal with the display of plans. The new opening report examines which piece moves or pawn advances are significant for each important variation. In the reference search you can now see on the board where the pieces usually go. If you start the new Monte Carlo analysis, the board also shows the most common figure paths.