ChessBase Magazine #225: Prague 2026's 27 Miniatures, Ten Opening Articles, and the Notes Players Write Against Themselves

Twenty-two minutes past one at night. In a flat in Indiranagar the laptop fan is turning, and on the screen a black king sits behind its own wall of pawns — nineteen moves, nothing more. I stopped the clock, pulled out paper and wrote: "White's seventh move. Everything after it was decided there."

The habit dates from 2026. After nine days in a Chennai press room I understood that the result is not the sound that arrives afterwards; the result is the sound nobody recorded. Since then every piece I write opens on a small object — a chair scraping, a clock being pressed, a mother's hands in the third row. ChessBase Magazine #225 opened the same way: a download, a PDF booklet, and inside it a tournament in Prague that I am now reading not from scoresheets but from the sentences of the players who sat there and chose those moves.

The Prague board, and the room behind it

The centre of ChessBase Magazine #225 is Chess Festival Prague 2026. Aravindh Chithambaram, Anish Giri, Gurel, David Navara and others annotate their own games — the same hands and the same eyes that picked the move now explaining, on camera, what was being thought and what was not. The issue's "Special" is twenty-seven highly entertaining miniatures, games with not one spare move in them. Alongside sit three opening videos in the voices of Jan Werle, Daniel King and Robert Ris, and ten opening articles on new repertoire ideas and current trends in opening theory. The packaging is plain: a direct download with the booklet as a PDF, or the booklet and a download key by post. The issue also ships as a "ChessBase Book" for iPad, tablet and Mac.

It is easy to call all of this a training product. For the club player it is training material; for the professional it is a repertoire market. For me it is a third thing: an issue in which the strongest players in the world explain, in their own words, why they lost — and that is the place in chess journalism where the most truth gets spoken. Nobody says at a press conference that he wrecked the game on move eleven by pushing his own pawn. He says it in an annotation.

The arithmetic of a miniature: nineteen moves and one settled moment

A miniature conventionally means a game shorter than twenty-five moves. Putting twenty-seven of them together is not mere entertainment — it is a curriculum, if you read it as one. Over recent months I have begun sorting such games into categories in my notebook, and three patterns keep returning.

First: the sacrifice is never the beginning; it is the confirmation of an ending. The gorgeous blow in a miniature — a knight on f7, a rook on h7 — is really a decision taken on move three or four, when one player sent the queen out early or weakened the wall in front of his own king for no reason. The sacrifice is the public accounting of that decision, not its cause.

Second: the real subject of a miniature is tempo, not material. In short games the loser is often a pawn up — the "free" pawn on b2 or g2, which took two moves to take and the whole game to give back. I have watched this at club level hundreds of times: the player counts pawns, not tempi. One pawn is not worth two tempi, and that single sentence is the largest lesson inside twenty-seven miniatures.

Third: defensive moves are more fragile than attacking ones. Attacking, a player's attention covers half the board; defending, he must see all of it, and precisely there an "ordinary" developing move sinks the game. That is why I read a collection of miniatures as a book about defence rather than attack.

Elite annotation: the statement of the move that was never played

Aravindh Chithambaram appearing among this issue's annotators is a different kind of news for an Indian reader who watched him grow up on the Chennai and domestic circuit. Indian chess writing tends to collapse into a single name; Aravindh deserves his own paragraph, because his play represents a generation that grew up with engines and still proved itself over the board in classical events. When he explains a move, the explanation comes from hours at the board, not from a training manual.

Anish Giri's annotations are worth reading for another reason — he is among the least generous critics of his own play. When a player is hard on himself, the reader gets information no engine line contains: which move was visible, which was not, and why the mind refused it.

David Navara's relationship with Prague is different — this is his city, and playing on a home board changes the language of an annotation. Together with Gurel and the rest, the issue becomes a polyphonic document: one tournament, many voices, and in the middle those twenty-seven games that someone labelled "entertaining" and thereby made small.

Opening videos and ten articles: a repertoire is a structure, not a fashion

Werle, King and Ris — three distinct styles. Daniel King's gift is to explain a move first in plain language and then add the technical layer a club player will need three months later. Werle and Ris go more directly at the repertoire: which line works today, and to what extent. The ten opening articles complete the package with the videos, and here an old unease returns.

When ten thousand players start playing the same "new" move, it stops being new within three months. This is the strange economics of opening writing: the better it is, the faster it kills its own subject. I say this as a description, not a complaint. A repertoire is a structure you fill with your own understanding, not a set of someone else's ready-made moves. The player who memorises ten lines from ten articles will walk into the same trap he read about.

The hardest question: who finds out?

Here is where I see the issue's real weakness, and it is not in the content but in the distribution. Indian chess never had a popularity problem; it had a distribution problem. A first-rate issue, in which world-class players explain their own errors, needs to reach the club player in a district town in Bihar who is playing an engine at ten at night and does not own a credit card. Booklet and download key by post is a 1980s supply chain attached to a 2026 product.

And the "entertaining miniatures" framing bothers me for a second reason: entertainment is the surface, not the product. The product is the loser's confession. Collective memory keeps the sacrifice and drops its cause, which is why we repeat the mistake. An issue that tells you what happened four moves before the sacrifice is not entertaining; it is necessary. Some stories are not rejected; they are simply waiting for a different reader.

What to watch next

In the next issue I will be watching whether miniatures get their own section — whether they are moved from entertainment towards curriculum — and whether the number of Indian annotators climbs past two. The printer stopped, but the match kept playing in the margins; now the margin is a PDF, and in that PDF there is a paragraph by Aravindh. For me that is the biggest story in this issue. The only question left is whether that paragraph reaches the sixteen-year-old who does not yet know the name Prague — and who right now owns an engine and no annotator.