Game of the Week #743: Fourteen Years of Telling Chess, One Game a Week

On a Wednesday evening in Amsterdam, Merijn van Delft sits down at the chessboard. He opens a game titled Gaal vs Smeets, places the engine evaluation bar beside him, and begins to speak. There is no audience in the room, no applause, only a man, a game, and a camera. That recording carries the number 743, meaning he has repeated this ritual for more than fourteen years, once a week, almost without pause. From Nha Trang, I watch it back and notice something odd: in an age when every piece of content must explode within thirty seconds, someone is still patiently keeping time for an old game. ONE AND A HALF DECADES, ONE STEADY BEAT "Game of the Week" is a series produced and released regularly by ChessBase, the German chess software and database company. Each episode is a carefully selected game, systematically annotated, supported by an engine and integrated directly into the database. The current presenter is Merijn van Delft, a Dutch International Master (IM). He lived for many years in Hamburg before moving back to Amsterdam, and in 2026 he earned one Grandmaster norm, a milestone every professional understands as both glorious and unfinished: a full Grandmaster title requires three norms plus a 2500 rating. One norm is proof of a peak performance, not a permanent pass. What matters here, though, is not the game Gaal vs Smeets. In everything the program publishes, there is not a single line about the opening, the result, or the course of that game. The two players' names appear as a label, with no rating, no nationality, no tournament context. The product being promoted is the show; the game is merely the excuse to switch on the camera. For someone in my trade, that is an interesting professional detail: a program that has survived fourteen years without needing to sell a specific game sells rhythm instead. WHY EPISODE 743 IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT If we set the advertising aside, only one thing remains worth analyzing: the longevity of the series. Seven hundred and forty-three episodes over more than fourteen years, airing every Wednesday evening, is a fact that speaks. It reveals steady demand, not tied to a tournament cycle, not dependent on a World Cup or a title match. In the chess world, most content lives off events: a big tournament, an anticipated clash, a scandal. When the event passes, the audience drains away. Van Delft's series runs against that rule. It resembles a weekly newspaper more than a television channel chasing breaking news. I remember my years as a chess commentator for VTC. We too had a steady broadcast rhythm, but that rhythm depended on the international calendar, on the finals the whole country waited for. Some weeks were busy, some empty. The hard part of commentary is not the big match but the silence between big matches: at that moment, do people still sit down and tell each other about a game? "Game of the Week" answers that question through its own existence. Fourteen years, one game a week, no reason needed. AN ARCHIVE AS A FORM OF PUBLIC MEMORY There is a notable economic angle. Once an episode is produced, it costs almost nothing more at the margin to keep existing. The 743 episodes together form a searchable library, running day and night, serving learners in any time zone. A beginner can start from any episode; a stronger player can revisit a specific opening theme. Each game, therefore, does not stop at being a lecture: it is a fragment of memory stored on a hard drive, waiting for someone who knows how to listen. A record never grows old; it simply waits for someone who knows how to listen. At my age, I realize such archives are worth more than a peak match: a peak match excites people for one night, while an archive makes them improve for a lifetime. When the pandemic swept through in 2026, I sat in Nha Trang, clearing out a storage room, and found old VHS tapes of record-holding track athletes. The stadium was empty, yet the applause of 2026 still echoed in every old record. That feeling returned when I watched "Game of the Week." A chess program with no grandstand, yet with something similar: the presence of a storyteller. Every stadium I walk through has a secret door, and the entrance is always a person. For this series, that door is named van Delft. THE OTHER SIDE OF A SUSTAINABLE MODEL Every form of endurance has its price. A 743-episode series tied tightly to one presenter is a series wagering on one person. If van Delft wants to pursue the Grandmaster title seriously, something he is described as eager for, then playing time and production time will fight over every evening. Fourteen years of keeping the weekly beat also means fourteen years of placing the pressure of regularity on one individual. Regularity is a friend to the viewer and a burden to the maker. Then there is external pressure. Paid annotation content now competes with countless free channels: live streamers, short clips cut from games, watch-along broadcasts. That content is faster, cheaper, and far easier to spread. A meticulously annotated product like "Game of the Week" only holds its ground if it differs in depth: database integration, analytical accuracy, and the presenter's credibility. When free content floods the market, expensive content must prove it is expensive for a reason. What is interesting is that the very maturity of the content market creates a counter-current niche. In the age of the thirty-second video, I spent three months listening to a man tell the story of a 400m race in 2026, and I believe a segment of chess audiences still wants to be taught properly, slowly, systematically. They do not need spectacle; they need understanding. RHYTHM AS A VALUE What I take from a seemingly dull news item about episode 743 is not the game Gaal vs Smeets but the rhythm. The chess world is used to measuring everything by rating, by norms, by coefficients. But there is a quantity rarely counted: the capacity to keep going. A program that has lasted fourteen years teaches us that chess education is not an event but a habit. A good chess teacher is not the one with the single best lecture, but the one who shows up every week so that lecture can accumulate. From Nha Trang, I still follow series like this, because they remind me that my work goes beyond recording victories. That work is keeping a habit from breaking. Episode 743 will become 744 next Wednesday, and somewhere in the world a person will open a screen, place a hand on a piece, and learn one more thing. The most durable record in chess is not on a rating list; it is on a calendar.