ChessBase Magazine #225: Prague 2026, 27 Miniatures and the Art of What Remains Unsaid

ChessBase Magazine #225: Prague 2026, 27 Miniatures and the Art of What Remains Unsaid Some games end so quickly that you have to reopen the scoresheet to believe they actually happened. No sixty-move exchange of pieces. No rook-versus-rook endgame whose result both players saw coming from move thirty. No moment where both opponents lean back in their chairs and exhale because they have crossed the threshold of a draw. There is only one idea placed on the board, another idea answering one square off, and then it is over. I have spent most of my professional life commentating on long games. Thirty-two years at the microphone for VTC taught me that audiences wait for the endgame, where the breathing slows and every mistake costs ten times more. But the older I get, the more I believe that the truth of a game lives in the region people least want to sit and listen to: the first moves. For most spectators, that region still looks more like a homework session than a fight. ChessBase Magazine number 225 has just been released, and it devotes an entire special section to exactly that region. One publication, two formats, and one admission ChessBase Magazine is the periodical of ChessBase, the long-established German chess software publisher. Issue 225 ships along two routes: a direct download including a booklet as a PDF file, or a printed booklet with a download key for those who prefer delivery by post. The technically notable detail is that the issue is also packaged as a ChessBase Book, readable on iPad, tablet and Mac. That detail is small, but it says a great deal. For years I kept the habit of taking notes on paper, because I belong to a generation that believes the hand must touch paper before the head will remember. But when I watch a young player open an analysis file, switch to the board, drag a variation, and return to the text within seconds, I understand that I am holding on to a habit that has become my own private heritage. The publisher understood that before I did. The content of issue 225 revolves around one specific event: Chess Festival Prague 2026. Around it sits a special section of twenty-seven miniatures, opening videos by Jan Werle, Daniel King and Robert Ris, and ten opening articles offering new repertoire ideas for club players. Prague 2026: the setting of a city that does not shout Chess Festival Prague is one of the most consistently staged classical tournaments in Europe. The familiar structure includes a Masters round-robin for the top group, a Challengers section immediately below it, open tournaments, and rapid and blitz events wrapped around the edges. The atmosphere differs sharply from events that the media chase. Prague does not sell noise. The city sells concentration. I have never sat in the tournament hall. But I have spent enough evenings rewinding recordings from Prague across many years to know that there is a very particular silence in rooms like that. It is not the silence of an empty stadium. It is the silence of a library where everyone knows they are being watched. Based on my experience following games in Prague across several seasons, I have noticed something rarely mentioned: the quality of a game's analysis depends heavily on whether the player genuinely wants to retell it. Some people play well but narrate badly. Some narrate so well that you forget they just lost. Four names in issue 225 are Aravindh Chithambaram, Anish Giri, Ediz Gurel and David Navara, alongside several others. Four names, four different generations of understanding the same game. That is why this section is worth reading more than a results summary. Aravindh Chithambaram and calculated slowness Aravindh Chithambaram belongs to the wave of Indian players born in the late 1990s, a generation that grew up after Anand had already opened the door for an entire nation to sit at the board. What sets him apart is not calculation, because at that level everyone can calculate. It is tempo. When I rewatch Aravindh's games, what strikes me most is how often he spends more than ten minutes on a single move between moves twelve and twenty. That frequency runs above the norm for players of his rating. He does not hurry through the phase where most young players want to sprint. He stops, rereads the position, and then chooses a move that looks slow. His choice of slowness while the rest of the world accelerates is a statement. It says he trusts understanding structures more than he trusts memorising variations. In his analysis for issue 225, what I read in him is a refusal to justify weak moves. He points them out, names them, and moves on. A player willing to say that his last move was a mistake is doing something many in the profession cannot do: he protects his credibility by accepting the cost of it. Anish Giri and the opening laboratory Anish Giri is a special case in modern chess. He has been among the world's top players for more than a decade and is simultaneously a well-known author. Few people both play at the highest level and write about the game at that level with the same fluency. In the Prague 2026 section, Giri resumes a role he has held for years: the man who opens the laboratory door for others to look inside. The interesting part is not the variations he presents but the way he presents where he went wrong in his preparation. There is an uncomfortable truth in professional chess: most opening preparation is wasted, and nobody wants to admit it. A player can spend hundreds of hours on a system, sit down at the board, and watch the opponent play a move that has never appeared in any database. Giri is one of the few willing to retell that moment without embellishment. For club players, the value lies elsewhere. Giri shows that learning openings is not about memorising a sequence of moves but about understanding a structure deeply enough to find the move yourself when the sequence breaks. That is a transferable skill. It does not depend on whether you have a good memory. Ediz Gurel and youth without fear Ediz Gurel is the youngest name in the analysis group. The Turkish player belongs to a generation born after engines had already completely dominated analysis. For Gurel, the engine is not a tool to double-check thinking. It is the first teacher. That produces a different kind of player. They do not carry the fears of earlier generations about entering unverified positions. They have seen too many positions dismissed as unplayable evaluated as balanced. Reading Gurel's analysis, I noticed something interesting: he explains his moves in the language of ideas, not the language of variations. That is the mark of someone who has digested the tool rather than been led by it. But youth leaves traces. In a few games, Gurel's decisions reveal impatience at precisely the stage that demands the most patience: when the position is already good and simply needs not to be ruined. That is a lesson no engine can teach, because an engine does not know fear and therefore does not know why anyone would wait. David Navara and the culture of the annotator David Navara has been the Czech number one for nearly two decades. He belongs to the model of player trained in the classical tradition: reading books, copying old games by hand, taking notes in writing, and treating annotation as part of the profession rather than a side job. What makes Navara distinctive in issue 225 is that he writes like a responsible storyteller. No move is presented without a reason. No judgement is offered without evidence. In an era when most chess content is produced fast, Navara's voice is almost an act of resistance. He writes slowly. And because he writes slowly, the reader is forced to read slowly too. It is a form of discipline imposed by the writer on the reader, and it is rare enough to deserve recognition. Twenty-seven miniatures and the value of concision The special section of issue 225 is twenty-seven miniatures. In chess terminology these are games that end before reaching a certain length. There is no absolute definition, but most literature places the threshold somewhere between twenty and twenty-five moves. To outsiders, a short game is usually taken as a sign of a blunder. That reading is wrong. A miniature at a high level is not the product of incompetence. It is the product of a small mistake magnified by an opponent who knows how to magnify it. There is a line I still use on air: the board never lies, only we deceive ourselves with applause. In a miniature there is no room for applause. Everything is decided before the audience understands what is happening. Three patterns of error recur in high-level miniatures. The first is underestimating an in-between move: a player calculates the sequence correctly but misses a single insertion between two moves that seemed adjacent. The second is overextension: a player with the better position feels in control and expands toward the kingside while the centre remains unconsolidated, and the opponent strikes into exactly that gap. The third is the trap of material: a pawn looks free, a knight on the rim looks capturable, and while collecting it the player opens a line for an attack that cannot be stopped. These three patterns repeat across most of the twenty-seven games. What makes them worth reading is context. Each game sits beside an explanation of what the player was thinking, what they had prepared, and what they expected. A miniature without context is just an accident. A miniature with context is a lesson. For club players, this is probably the most valuable section of the whole issue. Not because they will meet the same position, but because they will meet the same kind of pressure. Failure is not a wrong move; it is seeing the right idea clearly and still not daring to play it. Three opening teachers, three methods Issue 225 includes opening videos by Jan Werle, Daniel King and Robert Ris. Three people, three approaches, and the differences between them say a lot about how chess is taught. Jan Werle belongs to the structurally inclined school of opening experts. His presentations usually begin by explaining what the position wants, and only then move to specific moves. The learner absorbs a framework of understanding before absorbing a sequence to memorise. Daniel King is known for turning complex ideas into sequences with rhythm. His guidance is closer to storytelling than lecturing. The upside is that attention is retained; the downside is that learners sometimes remember the story and forget the principle. Robert Ris pursues a fast, dense style. His videos typically carry a high information density, suited to players with a foundation who need quick updates. This is content for people with little time and many games ahead of them. These three methods do not compete. They serve three different stages of the same learner. What is notable is that ChessBase places all three in one issue instead of choosing a single approach and forcing the reader to adapt. Ten opening articles and the economics of opening knowledge The ten opening articles in issue 225 are the most practical section. Each presents a new idea for a repertoire system, usually tied to a specific variation and a handful of reference games. There is a hidden economic problem in this kind of content. Opening knowledge depreciates fast. An idea published today will be refuted within months, sometimes weeks. Someone buying an opening article is buying something with a short shelf life. So why do people still buy? Because what they are really buying is not the idea but the way the writer found the idea. A good opening article teaches you how to ask questions of a position. When the specific idea expires, the method remains. That is why I always advise young players starting out not to read opening articles the way they read a dictionary. Read them the way you read the diary of someone who is thinking. Silence and what goes unrecorded In 2026, when tournaments took place in halls without spectators, I commentated on dozens of games where the only sounds were pieces touching the board and the breathing of players. When the hall is empty, I hear the game whispering in a different language. I bring up that memory because issue 225 has a feature that reminded me of it. Most of the content in this publication is what gets written after the game has ended. The reader does not see the silence between moves, the player standing up and walking around, the ten minutes spent staring at the ceiling. Those gaps are not recorded. But they are precisely where the game is decided. From keyboard to board, the speed of words is never as fast as the speed of a move. A journalist can spend three hours writing about a moment that lasted three seconds. That is the fundamental asymmetry of this trade, and it is also why I still believe no analysis can replace sitting at the board. A contrarian reading Most readers will open issue 225 for the Prague section, for the four names, for the feeling of stepping into the analysis room of the best players alive. I think that is reading it in the wrong order. The twenty-seven miniatures are the part with the longest shelf life. Long games at the highest level usually teach club players very little, because they operate at a level of precision most people can never approach. You watch a seventy-move game between two top players and you admire it, but you learn nothing you can apply to your Thursday-night game. A miniature is different. It shows you a mistake that could happen to anyone, handled by someone only slightly better than you at decisiveness. That distance is closer. Close distance teaches. Conversely, I also believe the chess content industry misprices this material. Publications tend to promote an issue with analyses by top players, while the most practical material, short games, exercises and simple structures, is placed at the back. Buyers lose out, and sellers fail to realise they are mistaking their best product for their least important one. There is a larger question behind that. In a year when the volume of chess content produced exceeds the output of the entire previous decade, what players lack is no longer information. They lack a filter. They need a place that tells them which of thousands of games deserve three hours of their time. One more thing deserves to be said plainly. Women's chess events receive far less attention than their professional quality warrants, and much of the attention they do receive comes from campaigns with other purposes. Sponsors use a women's chess event to display social commitment, then leave when the campaign ends. The players stay with the tournament, with short contracts, with prize funds that cannot sustain a full professional career. Similarly, information about player condition is always controlled. Organisers publish what benefits the tournament and withhold what might harm it. A withdrawal for health reasons is usually announced in one sentence, and that sentence is all the fans get. I am not asking for access to anyone's medical file. I am saying that vacuum is always filled by speculation, and speculation always harms the weaker party. What remains after the issue is closed Issue 225 will sit in my library next to older copies that have yellowed. I will not reopen it for the Prague section, good as it is. I will reopen it for the twenty-seven miniatures, and for something simpler: a publication willing to make room for games that end early is a publication that believes its readers are mature enough to learn from fast defeat. The board never lies. It only waits for someone to sit long enough to listen. The question I leave behind is not for the publisher. It is for the player. When you open a database and see millions of games spread out before you, are you looking for a new idea, or for a new way of seeing the ideas you have carried with you for a very long time?