FRITZ 20 and How a Generation of Vietnamese Chess Players Is Relearning How to Train

A small chess club on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street, District 1, Saigon, nine in the evening. A fifteen-year-old sits in front of a screen, rewinding a game she played at the national junior championship in April. At move twenty-four she stops and turns to me: "Why does the computer say this move is bad when it looks right to me?" I do not answer straight away. I have heard that question for seventeen years; only the asker changes. In 2026, while I was working the chess commentary desk at VTC, I heard an older player advise a younger one: let the machine handle the calculation, leave the chess to humans. It sounds appealing. It is wrong in exactly one place. At the top level today, the machine took the calculation long ago, and what is left of "chess" depends on that very calculation. Splitting the two is a way of lying to yourself. That is why, when the FRITZ 20 product description spread across Vietnamese chess forums earlier this month, I read more slowly than usual. It presents itself as a training revolution for serious players, from those starting structured training to those already competing in tournaments. I care nothing for the "revolution". I care about the "training". Fritz has been in Vietnamese training rooms for a long time. In 2026, Fritz 3 beat Garry Kasparov at a tournament in Munich, the first time a commercial program defeated the world champion in an official game. In 2026, Deep Fritz drew 3.5-3.5 with Vladimir Kramnik over eight games in Bahrain. Four years later, in Bonn, Deep Fritz beat Kramnik 4-2. A generation of Vietnamese players grew up on exactly that sequence, and on a copy of Fritz installed on the machine for whenever they ran out of ideas. There is a shift that rarely gets discussed. Once computers passed humans in strength, the question stopped being which machine is stronger. The question became which machine makes a person improve faster. FRITZ 20 bets on the second half, with clear positioning: an individualised training tool, not an analysis engine built to crush opponents. Vietnam deserves a closer look. We have players at world level: Le Quang Liem has passed 2700 Elo, Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son has held form around 2650 Elo for years. Behind them the gap to the junior group remains wide. The cause is rarely access to software, since strong engines are everywhere. The cause is method. Until around 2026, most serious players in Vietnam used an engine in exactly one way: run the analysis, look at the best move, nod, write it down, forget it. I have sat beside young players repeating that loop for hundreds of games. They had data. They had no method. Three things separate data from method. The first is the ability to ask the question backwards. An engine gives a move and a number. That number is the output of a chain of assumptions about perfect play from both sides over the next fifteen moves, at a given search depth. Strong players use it to interrogate, for instance: if I take the third-best move instead of the best, where does the position change? A good training tool has to permit that question rather than only answer it. The second is the distance between understanding and memorising. A twenty-move opening line, memorised without understanding why move seventeen matters, collapses within three moves the moment an opponent deviates. What training software can do for a learner is force them back to that exact move, across many different positions, until it lands. The third is self-assessment. This is the weakest area for Vietnamese players at every age. We are good at criticising others and poor at criticising ourselves. A lost game is usually processed emotionally for thirty minutes and then filed away in a drawer. A machine has no emotion. That is its greatest strength, and the thing most often ignored when someone buys software. Back to the girl's game. Her twenty-fourth move was a rook-pawn push, and the engine rated it about four-tenths worse than a knight jump. But she saw something the evaluation bar does not display: after the knight jump, two of her pieces would be pinned on the same open file, and she did not have the time to calculate at that rhythm. She played the pawn push and steered into a slower position. She drew. Based on my experience following games at national junior championships, decisions of this kind appear more and more among the fourteen-to-eighteen group, and they are routinely skipped over by the people coaching them. FRITZ 20's positioning rests on three promises: training more efficiently, more intelligently, more individually. Those three promises are not equally hard. "Individualised" is a data problem, solved by recording a learner's error history. "More intelligent" is an algorithm problem, choosing the right position to train at the right moment. "More efficient" is a psychological problem, and no software solves it for you. In a session I usually have young players do exactly three things in order. First, play a game with the engine off. Second, write down the three moves they doubt most, with reasons. Third, open the machine and compare. The self-detection rate in the group I follow is roughly four in ten at first, rising to nearly seven in ten after three months if the routine holds. That number does not come from software. It comes from being forced to commit to a judgement before seeing the answer. The blind spot of any powerful training tool is that it creates dependency faster than it creates ability. I have watched this in Vietnamese chess for a decade, and I have watched the same pattern in esports, which I follow in parallel. Esports taught me something chess hides better: a good analysis tool can turn a user into a copy of itself within six months, if the user never dares to disagree. In my first V-League summer as a working analyst, I learned something very basic: a shape is only beautiful when the opponent agrees to stand still. In chess, the opponent never stands still. And here is the part product descriptions rarely mention. The same technology that trains you is the technology that lets someone else cheat. Online chess now carries prize money, sponsors and internationally organised events played over the network, and with them comes engine assistance inside games. Betting accelerates that. I have no independent data to size it, and I will not invent any. But from what I observe on online arenas, cases are handled more slowly than the tools develop. Data limits: everything about FRITZ 20's features in this article comes from the publisher's official product description, not from independent measurement. I have no control data in Vietnam, no user group large enough to compare rates of improvement, and no sample that controls the most important variable of all, the time a learner actually spends at the board. What I want to know lies elsewhere. How strong FRITZ 20 is, every machine is strong. What is worth watching is how many young Vietnamese players over the next six months will dare to open the software, play a move they believe in even when the machine says no, and then prove it patiently. No tactic is ever outdated; only the way we read a game expires.