ChessBase Magazine #225: 27 Short Games Worth Remembering from the Prague Chess Festival 2026

ChessBase Magazine #225 and the 27 Short Games Worth Remembering from the Prague Chess Festival 2026 Twenty-seven games. Not twenty-seven moves, and not twenty-seven pages of opening theory copied from old books — but twenty-seven complete, short, violent games, selected and arranged in a dedicated section of ChessBase Magazine issue 225. In the chess world, players call them by a word that sounds like a breath: "miniatures." I spent an entire evening opening each one like peeling back the layers of an onion, and the more I peeled, the more my eyes stung. I once believed in emotion, until a number knocked on my door at 3 a.m. This time, that number was 27. Context: a release that carried an entire festival ChessBase Magazine #225 is not merely a periodic publication. It is tied to the Prague Chess Festival 2026 — one of the events with the densest concentration of professional chess in Europe last season. The issue is released as a direct download with a PDF booklet, or as a printed booklet with a download key sent by post. The version for iPad, tablet and Mac is packaged as a "ChessBase Book," a digital reading format that can embed piece movements directly into the page. In other words, buyers are not just buying a book. They are buying an ecosystem. Among the contributors are names I have followed across many seasons: Aravindh Chithambaram, Anish Giri, Gurel and David Navara. Each handles the analysis of their own games — the format I have always considered the most honest in chess. A player dissecting his own game is handing over part of his professional secret to someone else. And the audience — us — receives it for free along with a cup of coffee. Alongside them are opening video series by Werle, King and Ris, plus ten in-depth opening articles with fresh repertoire ideas. Structurally, this is a complete content package: game analysis, tactical training, opening theory updates, and endgame experts presenting their technique. Core: the sequence of games as a sequence of evidence What caught my attention in issue 225 is not the big names. It is the number 27. A short chess game, in chess analysis, is often treated as an "accident" — the result of a mistake, an opening trap, or a lapse in concentration. But when someone arranges as many as twenty-seven such games in one section and calls them "highly entertaining," they are sending a different signal: brevity is not an error, it is a skill. Most of these games end within twenty to thirty moves. In the mathematics of chess, this is the most dangerous territory on the board — where opening theory has not yet been fully verified and intuition has not yet prepared itself. The winner in such games is usually not the better calculator, but the one who forces his opponent into an order of moves the opponent has never seen. The ten opening articles in this issue serve as terrain guides. They do not teach you "how to play well"; they show you "where the mines are." And the video series by Werle, King and Ris turns those guides into moving images — a way of learning I once dismissed in my later years, until I realised I learned more from a three-minute clip than from three pages of chess notation. There are players who are forgotten, but the data never forgets them. The same is true of miniature games. People tend to remember only the immortal games — the long, complex ones celebrated in classic anthologies. But a twenty-three-move game ending in checkmate is a far more memorable lesson than a seventy-move game ending in a drawn endgame. The human brain remembers stories, not patterns. And a miniature is a story with a beginning, a climax and an ending in a single breath. The analyses by Aravindh, Giri, Gurel and Navara place these games in a specific context — not just "this move was wrong," but "why, at this moment, in the atmosphere of this tournament, was that move chosen." That is the difference between an analysis engine and a player retelling the story of his own game. The engine tells you the truth. The storyteller tells you the reason. The counterintuitive angle: when brevity hides something else But this is where I must stop and argue against myself. There is a subtle temptation in worshipping short games: they are easy to digest, and they give the feeling that "I could play like that too." I have seen this in my own students: after watching three miniatures, they rush into the opening as if every game could end in twenty moves. The result: they lose to more patient players, who simply wait. The truth is that the 27 miniatures in one chess festival do not represent how chess is actually played. They are the tip of the iceberg — games that became entertaining because the opponent chose a wrong move, or because a new opening concept was tested successfully. The submerged part, the endgames that stretch for hours with technique trained to the level of reflex, is the foundation that allows you to reach the level where miniatures become a possibility. A pressing run is not noise. It is a question that data is whispering. And in chess, a miniature is not impatience. It is a question the white player has asked, and the black player has answered incorrectly. ChessBase Magazine #225 should therefore not be read as a statement that modern chess is becoming shorter. It should be read as an archive of how opening traps are set and triggered under real tournament conditions. What I value most is the honesty with which the publication does not try to turn twenty-seven short games into a theoretical claim. It simply shows you, analyses for you, and lets you draw your own conclusions. Takeaway: a signal for the next reading cycle If you are a club player looking to improve quickly, spend three evenings. The first for the miniatures — learning to recognise traps. The second for the ten opening analyses — learning the terrain. The third for the videos by Werle, King and Ris — learning to see an idea with your eyes before learning it with your hands. When the stadium is empty, the true value of a person begins to speak. When the board has no pieces beyond the starting position, the true value of a player begins to be exposed. So the question I leave you with: if you had to choose between learning one immortal game lasting eighty moves and thoroughly understanding twenty-seven miniatures ending in twenty-five moves — where would you spend your time? I light a candle for data. But I always let the flame of emotion light the way for the question.