FRITZ 20 – The Invisible Opponent in the Training Room of Vietnamese Chess Players

FRITZ 20 – The Invisible Opponent in the Training Room of Vietnamese Chess Players At 2:47 in the morning, in a small rented room deep inside an alley on Nguyen Thien Thuat Street, District 3, Saigon, a twenty-two-year-old chess player was still sitting before a computer screen. The blue light from the monitor spilled across his face, down the keyboard, and onto a wooden chessboard leaning beside him – a board he had not touched in four hours. On the screen, an evaluation bar shifted from white to black after a single move at depth thirty-four. He said nothing. He merely watched. Then he took a move back and tried another line. The engine answered. He took it back again. The engine answered. In a room with no one else present, a game was unfolding between a human being and something shapeless – something that existed only as lines of code flashing through a processor. That chess player was not lonely. Yet no one sat beside him. Somewhere else in the same city, another player was also awake. In Da Nang, in Hanoi, in Can Tho, in provincial towns where the nearest chess tournament lay three hundred kilometers away, young players were also sitting before screens running chess software, quietly training through the night. Among them was a name that generations of Vietnamese chess players have known for more than two decades – a name absent from sports bulletins and athlete rosters, yet the most familiar training companion of all: FRITZ. On the day FRITZ 20 officially launched, I asked a different question than technology reporters usually ask. They ask how strong it is, whether it can beat other chess engines. I asked: does a stronger training engine actually make a Vietnamese chess player a better chess player? And if the answer is no, then where does the real value of FRITZ 20 lie? CONTEXT: A MACHINE THAT HAS WALKED WITH US FOR GENERATIONS FRITZ is no stranger to anyone in Vietnam who has ever taken chess seriously. The engine was born in the early 1990s, developed by Frans Morsch and Mathias Feist, and quickly became one of the most popular commercial chess programs in the world thanks to its friendly interface, enormous opening book, and analytical power that was formidable for its era. For Vietnamese players who came of age in the 2000s, FRITZ was the first software they installed on a computer – sometimes a pirated copy passed hand to hand on a CD, sometimes a pre-installed version in internet cafes on Ly Thuong Kiet or Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street. In 2026, FRITZ entered history by facing Garry Kasparov in the famous Man vs Machine match, drawing the former world champion 3-3. Three years later, in 2026, it defeated reigning world champion Vladimir Kramnik 4-2 in a match held in Bonn, Germany. Those two events shaped an era in which chess was forced to look at itself again: from then on, the human being was no longer the strongest entity at the board, only the most interesting one. But that also meant the role of a chess engine had changed. It was no longer a challenger for humans to subdue, but a teacher, a companion, and sometimes a mirror reflecting the limits of humanity itself. Since then, the chess engine market has split into two branches. One is the open-source line – Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, Komodo – nearly absolute in strength and free of charge, but designed for analysis and research. The other is the product line, tied to user experience, learning interfaces, and a training philosophy. FRITZ belongs to the second. That is why the story of FRITZ 20 is not a story of a pure arms race for strength, but a story of how a machine can accompany a human being throughout the journey of growing up at the chessboard. In Vietnam, chess is a sport with a long history that has always sat at the edge of attention. Le Quang Liem has twice won the Asian Blitz Chess Championship, Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son earned his international grandmaster norm at just fifteen, and at one point Vietnam ranked near the top of Southeast Asia in the number of grandmasters. Yet domestic chess tournaments still take place before sparse audiences. Young players train mainly within four walls, with a computer and a piece of software as their only companion. That is the backdrop against which a machine like FRITZ 20 becomes uniquely meaningful. A chess instructor at the Ho Chi Minh City Sports Gifted School, who has taught chess to hundreds of young students for over fifteen years, told me that among his students, almost none have a private coach accompanying them through every training game. They train with the machine. They analyze with the machine. And when they enter a tournament, they meet people – but those people also grew up training the same way. This creates a generation of players with very precise thinking but also very lonely thinking. They play almost perfectly within lines they have studied, and struggle when an opponent steps outside those lines. CORE: FRITZ 20 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPANIONSHIP According to official introductory materials, FRITZ 20 is positioned not merely as a chess engine, but as a revolution in training for serious players. Its greatest distinction lies in personalization. Instead of offering a long list of analysis that players must sift through to find their own weaknesses, FRITZ 20 tracks the training process, identifies repeated error patterns, and adjusts exercise difficulty to the user's actual level. In other words, it does not only answer the question 'is this move correct', but also answers 'why did you play this move when you once played a different move in a similar position three weeks ago'. This is a deeply meaningful shift. For more than twenty years, most strong chess engines operated on the principle of maximizing computational power. They calculate tens of millions of positions per second, produce the optimal move, and leave players to draw their own lessons. The problem with that approach is that if the player lacks the skill to understand why that move is optimal, learning stalls. The player knows the answer but does not understand the question. That has been the great limitation of machine-based training for nearly two decades. FRITZ 20, as I read the materials about it, tries to fill that gap by shifting its role from 'judge' to 'explainer'. This matters for a generation of young Vietnamese players – those with access to computers but lacking direct human guidance. At a small seminar at a chess club on Nguyen Du Street that I once attended, a coach said something I have never forgotten: 'The machine being right is easy, but the machine understanding for you is hard.' FRITZ 20, if the developers' claims are accurate, is trying to do that hard thing. Another notable aspect lies in its philosophy of information display. Earlier FRITZ versions were already famous for their friendly interface. But FRITZ 20 goes further by integrating a system that classifies mistakes by severity, alongside specific training suggestions for each type. If a player frequently loses in the endgame phase, the system proposes a series of suitable endgame exercises. If a player frequently commits tactical errors after gaining an advantage, the system shifts toward exercises in managing advantage. This approach reflects a very modern training philosophy: training is not repeating what you are already good at, but confronting directly what you are weakest at. At the professional level, this means a grandmaster preparing for an international tournament can use FRITZ 20 to rebuild opening repertoires based on an opponent's specific playing style. They can load a database of the opponent's recent games, analyze opening selection trends, and construct counter-lines before entering the playing hall. This is work that once took weeks with the help of an assistant team. With FRITZ 20, it can be done in a few evenings. But a paradox lies deep within this story. The stronger and easier to use the machine becomes, the greater the burden of understanding the player must carry alone. If the machine has solved nearly the entire position for you, what is your remaining work? That is a question every player who uses a chess engine must answer at some point in their career. I once had a long conversation with a young Vietnamese international master who spent nearly four years training mainly with strong engines. He recounted a period in his career when he read hundreds of machine-analyzed games, understood every move clearly, yet could not reproduce that quality in tournaments. His feeling then was like standing before a locked door, knowing exactly what was inside, but having no key. That key, he said, did not lie in the power of the machine, but in how much time the player spent thinking for himself before the machine spoke. It is an experience I believe every chess player in Vietnam has passed through in silence. CONTRARIAN VIEW: WHAT THE MACHINE CANNOT REPLACE There is a popular belief in Vietnamese chess circles in recent years, roughly that if you use the right software and train enough with the machine, your level will automatically rise. This belief sounds very reasonable in an age when all data is available. But it contains a blind spot few mention: FRITZ 20 is stronger, smarter, more personalized, but it cannot teach a player how to sit still before an ambiguous position for fifteen minutes without pressing the hint button. That is the skill chess calls independent thinking, and it is the hardest to teach. In an official game, there is no hint button. There is no evaluation bar shifting color to tell you whether your move is good or bad. There is only you, your opponent, the clock, and seventy-five minutes of thinking. In those seventy-five minutes, every lesson you learned from FRITZ 20 has value only if you have already turned it into intuition. And intuition does not form from watching the machine analyze. It forms from being wrong many times yourself, then realizing that error yourself. This makes me think a great deal about how the current generation of Vietnamese players trains. There is a suspicious convenience in how the tool is used. A player can open the analysis engine after only thirty seconds of thought, whereas in a real game, thirty seconds is not enough to decide anything. The feeling of 'knowing' that the machine provides sometimes masks the feeling of 'not yet understanding' that a player needs to feel in order to grow. I once watched an older coach at the District 1 Chess Club teach his student by recounting a game he had played thirty years earlier, without a computer, without a database. He spoke of his mistakes in a 2026 game in Da Nang, detailing each move, each feeling at the time, each thought while his opponent bit his lip and considered. That is a kind of training no machine can replace, because it transmits something data cannot carry: the memory of a human being who once sat in that very position and once hurt. This does not mean FRITZ 20 is useless. It only means FRITZ 20 is a tool, and a tool always needs a responsible user. Players who understand the boundary between 'training with the machine' and 'letting the machine train you' will be those who benefit most. Players who let the machine think for them will soon discover that they have traded their capacity for thought for a feeling of safety. There is an interesting indicator I noticed when looking at recent youth chess tournaments in Vietnam: players with steadily improving results over many years tend to be those with a direct coach alongside machine training. Players who train only with machines often make very rapid leaps in the early phase, but then plateau after a certain threshold. They become very precise in the opening and middlegame, but lack the creativity needed in the endgame and in ambiguous positions. That creativity, to this day, remains a human possession. That is why I view FRITZ 20 with a mixture of caution and expectation. Caution because it may make the next generation of players more dependent on tools. Expectation because, if used correctly, it can help narrow the gap between players in big cities and players in provincial towns – where good coaches are scarce. A player in Ca Mau can have a quality teacher in hand through FRITZ 20. That is a positive thing few see when judging the machine solely by computational strength. EMPTY HALLS AND THE ECHOES THAT REMAIN For many years of writing about the chess world, I have always returned to one haunting image: rows of empty seats in Vietnamese chess tournament halls. National championships, youth tournaments, open tournaments – most take place in spacious venues with very few spectators. Those watching are mainly players' parents, a few coaches, and some long-time chess lovers. The sound of pieces touching the wooden board rings out clearly in the quiet room. The ticking of the tournament clock is the only steady sound. There is no cheering. There is no applause. Only the complete concentration of a few dozen people simultaneously living in their own worlds. An empty stand still has an echo – if only we are quiet enough to hear it. That echo is not a sound, but a meaning. It tells us that chess in Vietnam still exists, with players, teachers, writers, but not yet a community large enough to create crowded evenings like football or basketball. Against that backdrop, a machine like FRITZ 20 can be a remedy, or it can be a lonely substitute. I once sat at a youth chess tournament at Phu Tho Stadium on a July morning. Outside the stadium were basketball games packed with spectators. Inside, thirty-two young players competed in round seven with about fifty adults watching. A mother sitting beside me said her child had trained with software since age nine, three years now, and she had never seen him compete before a crowd larger than this. She said it with a mixture of contentment and regret. Contentment because her child had a healthy environment in which to learn. Regret because her child would never live in the light of a packed stand like children who play football. A machine like FRITZ 20 does not solve the empty-stand problem. It may even worsen it, since a young player can spend an entire youth training indoors, never needing to step outside, never needing to meet an opponent face to face. But it can also be a bridge for places where chess lacks enough people to organize tournaments. A player on an island district can spar with a player in Saigon via an online platform, with FRITZ 20 as referee, analyst, and companion. That is a potential I believe Vietnamese chess organizers should see and seize. The real death of a golden generation is when we stop remembering them. There are Vietnamese players who achieved considerable international results in the 2000s and early 2010s, yet today barely appear in collective memory. They are not mentioned in sports bulletins. They are absent from federation honor rolls. And when they stop competing, they cease to exist in public memory. It is a silent vanishing that I believe has deep roots in Vietnamese chess's lack of told stories. Tools can raise the level, but only stories keep people in the sport. A goal can fade, but the applause in memory never grows old. In chess there are no goals, no applause, only quiet moves and silent moments that only two people facing each other understand. Those moments need to be recorded, retold, and passed on. FRITZ 20 can analyze millions of games, but it cannot write the story of an eighteen-year-old Vietnamese player setting foot in an international tournament for the first time, the trembling hand pressing the clock, the moment in the waiting room hearing his own heartbeat. Those things belong to humans, and I think young Vietnamese players should be reminded of that more often. WHEN THE MACHINE BECOMES A COMPANION What I want to see in FRITZ 20, beyond computational strength or advanced training features, is a correct philosophy about the machine's role. If FRITZ 20 persuades users that it does not replace a coach, does not replace reading chess books, does not replace playing chess with humans, then it will be a contribution of lasting value to the chess world. If it positions itself as an all-powerful teacher, it may well produce a generation of players precise but devoid of vitality. In many conversations with young Vietnamese players, I noticed a common thread: everyone knows that at some point they must think for themselves, but very few actually do so during training. The convenience of the machine has posed a continuous temptation: press a button, receive an immediate answer. It is no different from looking up answers instead of solving a math problem. And in chess, answers are countless, but the ability to find answers is what determines your level. If FRITZ 20 has one most useful feature for Vietnamese players, in my view, it would be one that forces the user to think before receiving help. A good machine is not one always ready to give the answer, but one that knows when to stay silent so the user can overcome difficulty alone. This is something any good coach understands. And if FRITZ 20 can transfer that wisdom from humans to software, then it will truly be a breakthrough, worthy of the title 'training revolution'. Generations will pass, but the poem about them keeps being written. I still believe that ten years from now, looking back at this phase of Vietnamese chess, people will remember the games more than the software. They will remember the players who sat for hours before the board, more than the machines that calculated billions of positions. And in that memory, FRITZ 20 will be just a tool – important, useful, but not the protagonist. CONCLUSION: A QUESTION WITHOUT A FINAL ANSWER There is one thing I often wonder whenever I watch a young player train with a machine. What will happen to this generation of players in thirty years, when they become the teachers of the next generation. Will they be able to pass on to their students something beyond precision. Will they be able to recount a story about a game that changed their life, or only point at a screen and say this is the move the machine chose. FRITZ 20 gives Vietnamese chess players a more powerful tool than ever before. But a tool does not create value by itself. Value is created by how people use that tool. If a player in Ca Mau can use FRITZ 20 to study chess seriously, to prepare for an international tournament, to walk confidently into a playing hall he once dared not dream of, then that is an achievement the machine has helped create. But if a player in Saigon uses FRITZ 20 to avoid meeting people, to avoid facing real games, then that is a failure of that person, not of the machine. In that small rented room in District 3, when the clock struck four in the morning, the young player turned off the screen. He stood up, opened the window, and looked out at the empty alley. Outside, the city was still asleep. He turned back to the table, picked up a piece from the wooden board, and placed it back in its starting position. It was an act not found in any FRITZ 20 user manual. But it was the most important act of that night. Because it showed he was not merely training with a machine. He was training to be a human being who plays chess. The echo of empty stands will ring on forever, no matter how strong the machine becomes. And I hope the next generation of Vietnamese chess players, when sitting before FRITZ 20, will not forget that the most beautiful thing about chess lies not in perfect moves. It lies in the imperfect moments when humans dare to sit together, look into each other's eyes, and walk through a game together.