Game of the Week Episode 743: Fourteen Years Keeping the Rhythm of Chess Analysis Every Wednesday Evening

Wednesday evening. Amsterdam. Rain on the canal.

In a small studio, a chessboard, a microphone, and an engine evaluation bar blinking on a screen. Episode 743. The game is called "Gaal vs Smeets".

Chess is said to be the silent sport. But it has its own sound: the click of a mouse on a square, the engine returning a line, a man clearing his throat before saying "now we come to move twenty-one". For more than ten years, every Wednesday evening, that rhythm has not changed.

Episode 743 of "Game of the Week" — a chess analysis show produced by ChessBase — is presented by International Master (IM) Merijn van Delft. And here is what must be said at once, dryly, almost bluntly: in the entire promotional material for this episode, not a single line concerns the game itself. No opening. No result. Not one move. Everything told is the biography of the presenter.

That is the most honest starting point. And also the most worth writing about.

A durable content machine inside the chess world

ChessBase is neither a club nor a tournament. It is a long-established German chess software and database company, a name attached to the game collections that nearly every professional player has opened at some point. Alongside its software, it runs an entire content system: books, courses, and recurring video shows.

"Game of the Week" is one of them. The format is simple: each week, one game is chosen — usually a fresh, instructive over-the-board game — and analysed. The presenter talks, moves the pieces on a virtual board, and cross-checks against the engine's evaluation. Episodes typically run twenty to forty minutes. The audience is the improving player: from club level up to those aiming at master strength.

What matters is the number. Seven hundred and forty-three episodes. At one episode a week, that is more than fourteen years. The presenter, IM Merijn van Delft, is a Dutch player. He spent many years in Hamburg — the city tied to ChessBase's headquarters and culture — before settling in Amsterdam.

One thing about the presenter is worth stating, because it explains why the show holds up. He is not a world-class star, and he does not pretend to be. He is a player at a high level who nonetheless remains close enough to his audience that his voice creates no distance. In content work, that is a rare advantage: someone good enough to be trusted, close enough to be understood.

The Dutch context deserves a line too. It is a small country with a deep chess tradition, producing top players and a strong club culture. A presenter from that environment brings two things: a solid technical foundation and a natural modesty. He does not need to show off; he only needs to be right. And in an instructional show, being right lasts longer than being flashy.

The Grandmaster norm, understood correctly

In 2026, van Delft earned a Grandmaster norm. This is the most important technical detail about him, and also the most widely misunderstood detail in chess.

Grandmaster is FIDE's highest title for a player. To earn it, a player needs three GM norms and a rating of 2500. A GM norm is a feat: it is equivalent to a tournament performance at roughly 2600 level sustained across an event. That means van Delft has played one tournament at Grandmaster level. But that does not mean he holds the title. A norm is proof of a peak performance, not of a sustained rating. Outsiders look at it and assume the matter is settled. It is not.

So the real portrait of the presenter of episode 743 is this: a strong IM who has touched the Grandmaster threshold in a single event, still hungry for more — and for over a decade, his clearest footprint has been as a content producer rather than as a tournament competitor.

Why a habit becomes an asset

When a show reaches 743 episodes, the interesting question is no longer "is this game good or bad". The question is: what keeps it alive?

The first answer is rhythm. Every Wednesday evening. Not "whenever a good game turns up", but a fixed schedule. In the economics of content, a fixed cadence does something that individual quality cannot: it turns consumption into habit. Viewers do not have to decide each week whether to return; they only need to know that Wednesday evening has something to open. Regularity is itself a promise.

The second answer is the archive. Think of those 743 episodes as a library. Each one is a game untangled, a small lesson in structure, in planning, in endgame technique. Once produced, the cost of it continuing to be watched is close to zero. A fifteen-year-old player today can open episode 200 from eight years ago and learn something. No ticket, no time slot, no grandstand. This is an economic model the opposite of live-event rights: instead of one peak and then darkness, it is a slow current that does not run dry.

The third answer is the segment. Amid a chess content market packed with lively, fast, sensational live streams, there remains an audience that wants the opposite: slow, structured, pausable, rewindable. That is a defensible niche, because it demands something speed cannot buy: patience and expertise.

On the audience side, habit has a power that advertising cannot buy. Someone who has watched twenty episodes in a row will find it hard to skip the twenty-first. That is the accumulation effect: each episode carries not only its own value but the value of the whole chain behind it. This is why long-running shows tend to have higher return rates than standalone content, even when the quality of individual episodes is comparable.

A market full of noise

To understand why a slow show survives, look at what it competes against. Today, anyone wanting to learn chess has endless free options: online playing platforms with millions of games a day, vast video libraries, and lively live-commentary channels. There is plenty of noise, but noise is not instruction.

The difference is structure. A good live commentary is fast and emotional, but it has no table of contents. A good analysis show has one: you know whether you are studying the opening, the middlegame, or the endgame; you know you can return. For an improving player, what is needed is not one more game to watch but a way of understanding. And understanding requires structure.

That is why the evergreen instruction layer does not vanish when social media explodes. It merely shifts from being the only source to being the disciplined source. Its producers must accept a dry truth: they do not compete on excitement, they compete on trustworthiness.

The current that flows from teacher to student

Based on my years of watching chess games and chess shows, there is something rarely said aloud: products like "Game of the Week" do not sit at the summit of chess, but they sit at the layer that feeds that summit.

Picture the pipeline of the discipline. Upstream is talent: a child, a club player, a competitor stuck near 2026. In the middle is the content product: games taken apart, explained, turned from a sequence of moves into a lesson. Downstream is skill and market: better players who buy software, buy courses, enter tournaments, and sustain the whole ecosystem.

The analysis show is the middle link. It does something quiet: it shortens the distance between a club player and someone who understands why a Grandmaster played that move. Without that link, talent still emerges, but more slowly, and many give up halfway because no one is guiding them move by move.

Commercially, this is chess's "evergreen instruction" layer. It is fundamentally different from selling broadcast rights to a tournament. Event rights are seasonal: sow, harvest, then let the land rest. A 743-episode library is a field irrigated all year. For a company with software and a database at its core, this content layer also acts as a funnel: viewers learn from the video, then download the software, then buy a data package. Each episode does not need to be profitable on its own; it only needs to keep people inside the ecosystem.

The hearing of a man who lost his muse

There is a habit I have kept for years: going to places where no one is. Empty playing halls, training sessions of young players with no camera pointed at them, silent corridors after everyone has gone home.

In 2026, when world sport was forced to play in empty stadiums, I realised I had trained something I call the hearing of a man who lost his muse: the ability to hear what does not exist. In an empty hall, I do not hear the silence. I hear the applause of a past era, the ticking of clocks from games long gone. A show like "Game of the Week" runs on that same hearing: it detects what is worth learning in a game where most people see only a result.

This matters because it explains a paradox. We live in an age where every move is scored by an engine in an instant. Yet a man talking about an old game still has listeners. The reason is that the engine gives us the answer but not the understanding. The machine says "this move loses 0.8 of a pawn". The presenter says why this move loses 0.8, and how it loses inside the player's head. The second thing is not on the evaluation bar.

The blind spot: the game left behind

Here, let me return to what I said at the start, because it is the most counter-intuitive point of this story.

Before us is a product named after a game, and we know almost everything about the presenter, yet almost nothing about the game. No opening, no result, no date, no tournament. We know the speaker, not the speech.

There is a very human temptation here: fill the gap with guesswork. Guess that "Smeets" is a well-known Dutch Grandmaster of that name, guess that "Gaal" is a European player, guess that the game came from a recent event. Those guesses may be right. But they remain guesses, and once written as fact they turn romance into fabrication. Here I choose to leave the gap open, because the gap itself is the truth.

And in the end, the gap is what is beautiful. A show that lasts fourteen years does not last because of exceptional games; it lasts because of rhythm and trust, things invisible but more durable than any beautiful strike. The game Gaal vs Smeets may be a fine one. But if tomorrow it is replaced by another, the show still lives. The presenter is still there, Wednesday still comes, and viewers still switch on. That is the unglamorous truth of every mature content product: the frame matters more than the picture hanging in it.

I once believed the opposite. My most romantic mistake was believing that the pieces could write poetry — that one beautiful move was enough to keep people watching. In hindsight, that was a lovely but naive belief. Poetry does not sustain a show for fourteen years. Rhythm does.

And there is the matter of games no one knows by name. Just as the seventeen-year-old prodigy does not yet know he is about to become a legend, there are games by unknown players that no one has ever untangled. Episode 743 is one of them: a game that entered its own small history without either player at the board knowing that tonight, in Amsterdam, a man would retell their story to a few thousand viewers. That is the humblest kind of immortality sport can grant.

One dry detail must be noted, to avoid drifting into excess romance: those who choose games for such a show are often influenced by their own networks. A presenter living in Amsterdam, formerly in Hamburg, may well lean toward games by Dutch or European players. The pairing "Gaal vs Smeets" carries that flavour. There is nothing wrong with it, but nothing sacred either: it is the trace of a person, not of an objective standard.

Where the real risk lies

Setting aside worries about integrity or match-fixing — for a content product there is nothing to worry about — the real risk of a show like this lies elsewhere.

First is dependence on one person. A 743-episode brand tied to an individual is a brand betting on one person's endurance. If the presenter wants to pour his energy into chasing the Grandmaster title — which he has said he still craves — then the time spent producing content competes directly with the time spent training and competing. This is a real tension, and it is usually not resolved until it erupts.

Second is the commoditisation of content. When free commentary floods the web, a paid analysis product must compete on something else: rigour, depth, and integration with a database. If it competes on speed, it loses. If it competes on discipline, it still has a chance.

Third, and least discussed, is creator burnout. Fourteen years, once a week, without a break. Outsiders see a steady habit; insiders feel a treadmill. The man sitting in the empty hall must find his own reason to continue.

But fairness demands this too: the risk of this model is not large. No stakes, no fixing, no disputes. The only thing to worry about is the human being, and the human being has already endured fourteen years.

For those who follow chess, a few signals are worth watching in the period ahead. Van Delft's progress toward the Grandmaster title, if any, will indicate how much energy he still devotes to the board. The episode count, if it keeps rising steadily, is an indicator of the evergreen content layer's vitality. And if the identities of the two players in Gaal vs Smeets are confirmed by a game database, we can begin real analysis. Until then, the most honest thing is to say we do not know.

Closing

There is a paradoxical truth about chess: what is remembered tends to be the lightning strike, while what keeps the discipline alive is what no one notices. A game named Gaal vs Smeets will not enter the history books. But episode 743, and all the episodes before it, have quietly taught thousands of people how to read a board. When something lasts fourteen years without noise, it is no longer a product. It has become a habit, and habit is the most durable thing sport leaves inside a person.

After three decades at the desk, I have realised I never wrote about sport. I wrote about people who dare to keep a steady rhythm in a world that only loves applause.