11/11/2025 – This interview with Matthias Wüllenweber, Head of Development at ChessBase, was recorded last week, just before the official release of ChessBase 26. In it, he presents the major innovations of the new version, including the redesigned Opening Report, the Fashion Index, and the powerful Monte Carlo Analysis. If you missed it then, now’s the perfect time to discover how ChessBase 26 has evolved into a smarter, more intuitive tool for your chess training.
new: ChessBase Magazine 225
Chess Festival Prague 2025 with analyses by Aravindh, Giri, Gurel, Navara and others. ‘Special’: 27 highly entertaining miniatures. Opening videos by Werle, King and Ris. 10 opening articles with new repertoire ideas and much more. ChessBase Magazine offers first-class training material for club players and professionals! World-class players analyse their brilliant games and explain the ideas behind the moves. Opening specialists present the latest trends in opening theory and exciting ideas for your repertoire. Master trainers in tactics, strategy and endgames show you the tricks and techniques you need to be a successful tournament player! Available as a direct download (incl. booklet as pdf file) or booklet with download key by post. Included in delivery: ChessBase Magazine #225 as “ChessBase Book” for iPad, tablet, Mac etc.!
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.
From the 2026 Candidates Tournament, featuring a video review by Dorian Rogozenco, to Jan Werle’s opening video on the French Tarrasch Defence, and Oliver Reeh’s tactical column ‘Top Grandmasters at Work’. Analyses by Giri, So, Wei Yi and many others.
€21.90
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.
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.
YOUR PERSONAL CHESS COACH - Whether you’re taking your first steps into the world of club chess, or already playing at a tournament level: with FRITZ, you can train more efficiently, intelligently and with a more personalised approach than ever before.
Slav and Semi-Slav Powerbase 2026 is a database and contains a total of 11 766 games from Mega 2026 or the Correspondence Database 2026, of which 1136 are annotated.
For the Slav and Semi-Slav Powerbook 2026 the ratings average was set again at 2400. 2.24 million games from the engine room of playchess.com met this threshold, to which were added over 130 000 games played by humans.
In this volume, we dive into core aspects of chess technique. Smyslov taught the principle of tactical hierarchy, “checks, double attacks, and unprotected pieces”, and Mikhalchishin demonstrates how this method of calculation is vital.
Videos: Nico Zwirs examines two Petroffs from the 2026 Candidates. Robert Ris has a tip against the Caro-Kann Advance Variation with 3…c5. Fiona Sieber reveals a surprise weapon against the Najdorf. ‘Lucky Bag’ with 40 analyses by Ganguly, L'Ami et al.
YOUR PERSONAL CHESS COACH - Whether you’re taking your first steps into the world of club chess, or already playing at a tournament level: with FRITZ, you can train more efficiently, intelligently and with a more personalised approach than ever before.
In this powerful new course, endgame expert Karsten Müller teams up with rising star Leon Mendonca to deliver what truly matters: 10 essential rules that every player must know.
€19.90
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