ChessBase takeover

[Roger de Coverly]

In https://en.chessbase.com/post/founder-f ... -president
we learn the unrelated news that

In April of this year, Freedom Holding Corp. announced acquisition of ChessBase, one of the world's oldest and largest services specializing in chess software, analytics, and data. Expected investments in the project's development will amount to approximately €5 million.

By way of background

The President of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation and the founder and the majority shareholder of Freedom Holding Corp., Timur Turlov, has nominated himself for the post of the Deputy President of the International Chess Federation (FIDE). The next elections to the FIDE leadership team will be held on September 26-27, 2026, in Samarkand (Uzbekistan), as part of the General Assembly of the International Chess Federation.

Timur Turlov is the Kazakhstani businessman, the founder and the majority shareholder of the international fintech company, Freedom Holding Corp. The group is headquartered in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and New York, USA. The company's revenue for the 2026 fiscal year was $2.2 billion. Since listing on Nasdaq in 2019, this figure has grown 26-fold. The company's market capitalization exceeds $8 billion, and Forbes estimates Turlov's private fortune at $5.5 billion.

The Freedom ecosystem includes banking divisions in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, a brokerage business with nearly 1 million clients across all jurisdictions, insurance companies, marketplaces, and Lifestyle services. Timur Turlov's Freedom Holding Corp. operates in more than 20 countries. In addition to Kazakhstan and the United States, the group serves clients in the European Union and the Middle East. The Freedom ecosystem has a total of 14 million clients. This spring, the company announced agreements to acquire Turkish Bank A.Ş., the Turkish bank, and submitting documents to obtain a brokerage license in this country.

[Laurie Roberts]

It's a long time since I used Chessbase. I do wonder how popular their software still is. The quotes about it being essential software for the serious chess player don't ring true to me anymore.

I tend to use lichess studies for storing my own games or openings, with the latter also stored on chesstempo where I 'drill them' with spaced repetition learning.

I do like to curate a large reference database of computer chess engine games myself (taken from CCRL) which I use for playing through openings and seeing what computers play (which isn't necessarily what humans should play but it gives me ideas). But I use Hiarcs chess explorer pro for that - which has Mac and Windows versions (https://www.hiarcs.com/chess-explorer-pro.html). It's way less bloated than chessbase and cheaper (you only need the £63 version as the other versions just have a stronger engine and you can ignore that and just install stockfish). There is a video comparing it with chessbase here (https://youtu.be/1UBhTcAmLWQ?si=Xtit5KeNbFrSBFH4)

I do use scid 5.2 at times (https://sourceforge.net/projects/scid/) which is lightening fast but is a little less user friendly.

[MJMcCready]

Im by no means an expert on this but I always thought that chessbase and megabase were for more professionally minded players and more elite players who need to check out openings of their opponent mostly. I never bothered with it much because I thought at club level it just wasn;t very helpful in that regard. I could well be wrong there though.

[Laurie Roberts]

I don't think it is really that helpful tbh. I don't use software for opening prep against specific opponents not least because I never know in league matches who I'll play and their games won't be on there even if I did.

I play around with Hiarcs Chess Explorer to explore openings but tbh I could use Lichess database for that perfectly well. It's more that I like fiddling with it as a toy rather than a tool.

[MJMcCready]

That probably holds true for a lot of people.