ChessBase Magazine #225: Prague 2026's Twenty-Seven Miniatures and the Arithmetic of a Repertoire

At one in the morning last week I opened the booklet for ChessBase Magazine #225 and counted the miniatures before I read a single annotation. Twenty-seven. I did the counting first on purpose, because the section the magazine is selling as its “special” is an entertainment section — and entertainment sections are where the cleanest data hides. Games that end inside thirty moves leave no time for repair. They do not tell you who won; they tell you which move the opening preparation broke on. I keep a workbook that runs to eleven seasons — I keep a workbook the way other people keep a diary — and it taught me one habit: count the entertaining thing first, understand it second.

The architecture of #225 is plain. Selected games from the Chess Festival Prague 2026, annotated by the players themselves: Aravindh, Anish Giri, Gurel, David Navara and others. A special section of twenty-seven miniatures. Opening videos by Jan Werle, Daniel King and Robert Ris. Ten opening articles carrying new repertoire material. And the part buyers read least and need most — the trainers' sections on strategy, tactics and endgames. The issue ships as a direct download with a PDF booklet, or as a printed booklet with a download key by post, and the same content is included as a ChessBase Book for iPad, tablet and Mac.

The Prague festival runs several tiers inside the same week: a Masters at the top, a Challenger beneath it, and open sections around them. That has a direct consequence. One event produces mistakes at wildly different altitudes. The source pool for the miniatures is therefore mixed — somewhere a 2700-level game collapses in thirty moves, somewhere a 2400-level one does. Putting both in one collection is the smartest editorial decision in the issue, because a club player learns more from the errors of his own tier than from the errors above it.

A miniature is not a stunt; it is a diagnosis. Twenty-seven miniatures means twenty-seven games in which one side broke the rules of the opening and the other side collected the bill. In my workbook those entries split into three columns: the move after which the evaluation turned, the plan that broke, and the question the annotator did not ask. On twenty-seven games that three-column exercise costs about two hours, and in those two hours you learn more about your own repertoire than ten articles will give you. The pattern I keep meeting in chess is that the losing player writes least about his largest error.

The ten opening articles and the twenty-seven miniatures are two faces of the same coin — one is a prescription, the other a post-mortem. An opening article says what to play; a miniature shows how long that prescription survives once the opponent has prepared. I calculate half-lives for repertoire material as a matter of habit. At club level a fresh opening idea lasts two or three seasons; at elite level, weeks. The engine has known the idea all along, it is new only to the reader — a gap the marketing does not mention and probably should. When we were building ChessBase India, the largest single lesson was that the Indian club player buys the opening first and reads the endgame later; the order should be reversed.

The video section carries three distinct voices, and that is its strength. Jan Werle begins from structure, Daniel King begins from a question, Robert Ris begins from the database. Explain one opening three ways and the learner is forced to decide what kind of player he is. In 2026, when nothing outside the house was moving, the 2 a.m. chess stream was the only thing running at my speed; that was when I understood that video is not a substitute for annotation but another form of it. My habit is to draw the board grid by hand before I watch. I have always drawn the grid by hand before I trusted the software.

The winner's annotation is the most reliable and the most incomplete document in chess. World-class players explain the ideas behind the moves they found. The move they were afraid of gets fewer words. In a miniature the entire lesson sits in the loser's error, and the annotator is usually not the loser. So the twenty-seven miniatures are entertaining — that part is true — but their training value depends on whether the losing side's mistake receives equal space. The second blind spot is structural: a section sold as “highly entertaining” gets read as entertainment, and a section read as entertainment leaves no residue. The real question is whether any miniature in this issue refutes an idea proposed in one of this issue's own opening articles. A magazine cannot ask that about itself; a reader can. The third blind spot is delivery. A download lives on a hard drive, a booklet lives on a shelf. The training material of the 1990s survived because it was printed.

In the next issue I will check one thing: whether the index of twenty-seven miniatures is ordered by opening or by error type. An index by opening suits the player building a repertoire; an index by error type — over-extension, premature trade, neglect of the colour-bound pawn — suits the player who is about to repeat the same mistake next tournament. Reprinting twenty-seven games the second way costs nobody anything. The question is whether any magazine can make its own “special” worth a second reading, or whether we all read it once and shelve it.