Prague 2026 and 27 Miniatures: The Limits of Memory in a Sport

March 2026. I sit in the fourth row of a tournament hall in Prague, carrying the same digital recorder I have used since 2026, the year football returned to empty stadiums. I did not come to Prague to break news. I came to listen. What I hear is not the sound of spectators. It is the sound of a knight being placed on a wooden board, so softly that if I blink once, I will miss it. The person placing that piece is seventeen years old. He does not look up at the gallery, does not look at the standings, does not look at the computer screen running in the corner of the room. He looks only at the board, and in that instant I recognise I am standing exactly at the boundary I stood at eight years ago in Shanghai: When a seventeen-year-old prodigy does not yet know he is about to become a legend. That is why I follow the Chess Festival Prague 2026 differently from the way I follow other tournaments. I do not follow the standings. I follow the moments before the standings begin to mean anything. And when ChessBase Magazine released its 225th issue, devoting a full section to Prague 2026 with games annotated by Aravindh Chithambaram, Anish Giri, Ediz Gurel, David Navara and others, I understood why I had to write this piece. ChessBase Magazine 225 contains a section titled, with almost provocative simplicity, Special: 27 highly entertaining miniatures. Twenty-seven games. Short, sharp, decisive encounters that hold a viewer breathless within fifteen or twenty moves. Alongside them are opening videos by Jan Werle, Daniel King and Robert Ris, and ten opening articles offering new repertoire ideas for club players. A thick publication, a major tournament, a collection of short games. And I realised I was looking at a question nobody asks, including the people who made it. The question of memory. Chess, after more than a century of move-by-move documentation, still has no serious theory of what it remembers and what it forgets. We have enormous databases. Millions of games stored, labelled, sorted by opening, endgame, length, result. We have engines so strong they can identify a grandmaster's error forty moves deep in under a second. But we have no mechanism for deciding which games deserve to be remembered. The market has decided for us. The market remembers what is loudest. What is fastest. What can be packaged into a headline, a forty-second clip, a moment reshared with a flame emoji. The twenty-seven miniatures in ChessBase Magazine 225 are the embodiment of that mechanism, and also its most beautiful product. Behind them, in Prague, lie hundreds of forty-, fifty-, sixty-move games forgotten within the week they were played. That is what I want to write about. I began my career in 2026 as a chess player and tournament organiser in Vietnam, then moved into chess media, then spent twenty-two years as a chess commentator on television, covering almost all the classic finals of an era when people still argued about whether computers would kill the game. At fifty-three I live in Shanghai and write for the Chinese market. But I was born in Vietnam, and I still write in Vietnamese first, then translate. It is an inefficient habit. It forces me to think more slowly, and thinking slowly is the only thing that lets me see what speed conceals. In twenty-two years of commentary I learned one thing I never teach anyone: audiences do not remember moves. Audiences remember feelings. Most of a chess writer's job is converting structure into emotion. That is also the profession's greatest trap, because when everyone converts structure into emotion, structure disappears. Prague is a special stop on the European circuit. It has neither the history of Wijk aan Zee, nor the prize funds of the Gulf, nor the media pull of an event featuring a world champion. It exists on something else: the hospitality of a small city and the stubbornness of a few people who decided Prague deserved top-level chess. The 2026 Masters brought together ten players in a nine-round round-robin. Every game carries weight. No round is a warm-up. A single loss can drop you from title contention to mid-table in one afternoon. It is the cruellest format psychologically, punishing you by making you sit opposite your own mistake for the rest of the tournament. Aravindh Chithambaram won the Masters. How he won is the point. Aravindh is not the kind of player who makes you rise from your chair. He does not produce a masterpiece every round. He plays what I call silent accumulation: each game he takes something away from his opponent, not by beating them but by refusing to give them anything to beat. That style drives media mad. You cannot write a headline about a player who wins because his opponent could not find a plan. Reviewing his Prague games, Aravindh did not win by creating chaos. He won by maintaining a small, continuous, unbroken pressure until the opponent created his own problems. It is pressure the viewer cannot see, because it does not appear as a clear blunder. It appears as a string of slightly imprecise moves, each losing a fifteenth of an evaluation point, until after forty moves you realise you lost long ago. In his annotations for ChessBase Magazine 225, Aravindh explains the ideas behind those moves with a calm that is almost frightening. He does not talk about inspiration. He talks about structure. That is the kind of analysis chess magazines rarely publish because it does not sell. It is also the only kind that genuinely helps a club player improve. If Aravindh is a story of accumulation, Anish Giri is a story about the craft of finishing second. Giri is one of the most analysed and most misunderstood players of modern chess. For over a decade he has appeared at every major event, finishing anywhere from third to seventh, never able to translate that into the top. People call it tragedy. I call it an unacknowledged strategic choice. At Prague he played exactly as he has for ten years: solid, efficient, and almost never losing a game he did not need to win. Every move is the output of a probability calculation. It is the play of a risk manager, not a glory hunter. It works uncomfortably well. The professional circuit rewards stability: a player who finishes second six times a year earns more than one who wins twice and exits early four times. Then there is Ediz Gurel. Seventeen years old. A Turkish grandmaster, one of the fastest-rising talents of the new generation, and the source of the one thing Prague had lacked for years: unpredictability. Since 2026 I have kept a habit: every Wednesday I go to a youth training session and take notes. Not results. Gestures. How a young player stands up when the game ends. How they look at the board after losing. Their breathing when the clock shows thirty seconds. I started in 2026, when every newspaper in Shanghai was circling a sixty-million-euro football transfer. I skipped the editorial meeting for a reserve training pitch, where a seventeen-year-old named Zhou Junjie dribbled past three defenders in a five-a-side drill. Afterwards I stayed to watch him take free kicks. Seven out of ten into the top corner. An extraordinary number for a boy who had never played a professional match. The next day I wrote a long piece about the poetry in the left foot of anonymous children instead of the transfer story. My editor called me a sleepwalker with a licence. That piece changed how I work. In Prague, watching Gurel sit down before his first round, that feeling returned: the feeling of being in a room with someone whose story is mostly unwritten. Gurel played with the recklessness of a person who has never lost anything. He attacked in positions older players would simplify. He kept the queen on the board longer than necessary, sometimes longer than reasonable, simply because he believed he could find something. David Navara is the home player. Czech number one for years, one of the tournament's veterans, and the only man in the field with a personal relation to the city. He lives in Prague. He walks to the venue. There is a particular pressure in playing at home. When you lose elsewhere, you go back to a hotel and you are alone. When you lose at home, you drive back past the street where you went to school. Navara belongs to the generation trained before computers became mandatory. He grew up in a world where understanding an opening meant sitting with a book and a board for three days. I belong to that generation too. Today a twelve-year-old presses a button and holds the entire history of an opening, evaluated to the percentage point. That is an enormous advance in knowledge, and I do not oppose it. But it destroyed a kind of experience: the experience of not knowing. The experience of sitting before a position with nobody to ask. Of having to find out yourself why a move works, and sometimes finding out wrongly, and living with that wrongness for months. Players like Navara spent thousands of hours that way. When you hear them annotate in a publication like ChessBase Magazine, you hear not accuracy but a relationship. Now to the twenty-seven miniatures. The Special section gathers short games rated as highly entertaining. Short games have an irresistible appeal. A game finishing in twenty moves with a knight-and-bishop combination has a structural beauty an eighty-move game lacks. It is complete in itself. You can hold it in one reading. I taught chess to several generations of students in Hanoi and later Shanghai, and I always begin with short games. Not because they are easy, but because their boundary is clear. Cause and effect are close together, which builds causal links in a learner's mind. But there is a problem. A miniature is a statistical outlier. When you read a game that finishes in twenty moves, you are reading a game in which one side made a serious mistake. There are no exceptions. When you learn chess through miniatures, you learn to attack other people's errors. You learn to recognise a position already broken. You learn to finish work someone else began. That is a valuable skill. It is not the whole of chess. Most high-level games are not decided by large mistakes. They are decided by a string of small choices, each right or wrong by a few percentage points, accumulating into an irreversible advantage after fifty moves. That is chess with no moments. Chess that cannot fit in a forty-second clip. And it is slowly vanishing from the sport's collective memory. At Prague 2026 the Masters had nine rounds and ten players. Of the forty-five games, a significant share were sixty-plus-move affairs nobody remembers. The champions of those games never appear in anthologies. They are the ones who decide who wins. The three names attached to opening videos in issue 225 are Jan Werle, Daniel King and Robert Ris. This is a special lineage in world chess: not champions, but teachers. Players strong enough to understand the elite and patient enough to explain it to those who are not. Daniel King is the most familiar to international audiences, one of the clearest explainers I have ever heard. I learned from how he builds an explanation: never start with the move, always start with the idea. Jan Werle is a Dutch coach who built a career preparing openings professionally, the work most spectators do not know exists. Robert Ris is a coach and author focused on practical application, teaching chess for people who need it next Saturday at the club. Their presence in a digital publication signals the era. For decades openings were transmitted through books. A system would be defined by a single author for ten years. Today the cycle is weeks. An idea played in Prague is annotated, filmed, and inside every professional's database within a month. Within three months it is old. The ten opening articles in issue 225 are part of that machine. They supply new ideas responsibly, and they also contribute to the popularisation of secrets players spent hundreds of hours building. I do not say this as a criticism. I only say something was lost, and what was lost was time. The time of not knowing. What we gained in exchange is speed. ChessBase Magazine 225 is available as a direct download including the booklet as a PDF, or as a printed booklet with a download key by post. Issue 225 is additionally available as a ChessBase Book for iPad, tablet and Mac. For most readers that is logistics. For me it is the whole story. I began reading chess magazines in the late eighties and early nineties. Back then a magazine was paper. You could not search. You could not copy. You could not jump to a related game with one click. Which meant you read more slowly. And reading more slowly meant you remembered more. I still keep some of those magazines in a box in Shanghai. The paper has yellowed, the spines have come apart. But when I open one, I remember exactly where I was when I read it. Today I read ChessBase Magazine on a screen. The content is far better in every measurable way. And I remember less of it. That is an uncomfortable truth about the relationship between memory and medium. We assume information quality determines memory quality. My experience across thirty-seven years of watching this industry is the opposite. It is the difficulty of receiving information that creates memory. When something is hard, the brain works harder to understand it and binds it to more contextual signals. When something is easy, the brain processes it and releases the memory immediately. We understand everything and remember nothing. In 2026, thanks to a piece about that seventeen-year-old in Shanghai, a sports channel invited me to commentate live on the World Cup in Russia. In the opening match, in the ninetieth minute, watching a free kick, I got so excited I compared the player to a poet walking through the desert, and I got his name wrong three times in ten seconds. I called him Golovkin instead of Golovin. Three times. A week later a letter arrived by hand from an elderly supporter in Moscow: Thank you for seeing the poetry in that shot. I kept that letter in my wallet for years until it fell apart. I learned that verbal error can become a kind of portrait, if the speaker is honest enough. I often tell younger colleagues a line they laugh at: the most romantic mistake of my life was believing the ball knew how to write poetry. I do not laugh when I say it. I believe it. I believe the ball writes poetry, and the pieces write poetry. The problem arises when we turn that belief into a method, when we treat mistakes as a beauty mark and call it identity, when we return years later to argue that the mistake was actually correct. Chess does not forgive romance without foundation. Every move has an objective value. You may not know the truth, but it exists, and it does not care how you feel about it. Here is the blind spot. The prevailing assumption in chess media is that short games are the best games, because they concentrate beauty into a small span. We build anthologies around them. We call them gems. We put them in children's curricula. We never ask why. The answer, I think, has nothing to do with quality. It has to do with us. A miniature is easier to comprehend, not technically but cognitively. You can hold a twenty-move game in your head all at once. You cannot hold an eighty-move game. That is a limit of human working memory, not of chess. So when we select miniatures, we are not selecting the best games. We are selecting the games best matched to our own cognitive capacity. And we call it taste. The consequences are systematic. We produce a generation educated on miniatures, strong in attack and weak in accumulation. They know how to finish. They do not know how to start a long process. We build a system that rates players by their ability to create beautiful moments rather than their ability to win ugly games. And we arrive at a definition of greatness that excludes most of what greatness is. I saw this in football. When television began replaying highlights, people began judging players by highlights. When social media began spreading highlights, people began pricing players by highlights. Eventually a player excellent for ninety minutes but with no highlight became invisible. Chess travelled that road in twenty years, and faster, because chess was already organised around notation. We did not lose the ability to record. We lost the ability to pay attention. In 2026, when football was suspended, I fell into the worst professional crisis of my life. When it returned in June behind closed doors, I asked to make a radio feature about the sound of football. I took my recorder to a stadium in Shanghai. It was so empty I could hear the referee sigh in the sixty-seventh minute. The match finished goalless. I wrote two thousand words about the loneliness of the sporting hero. An empty stadium still holds the applause of the dead. That was my opening line, and I still believe it. But I must confess I have used that image too readily, borrowing it whenever I did not know what to write. Beauty has a temptation of its own: it makes the writer lazy about building. So I set myself a rule. I may only use the empty stadium when I have recorded something concrete. A specific person. A specific sound. A specific moment. At Prague 2026 I recorded one: a knight placed on wood. A player's sigh after leaving his chair. The footsteps of someone walking to a neighbouring board fifteen minutes after his own game ended. I must also address something I rarely discuss publicly. When a player enters a tournament carrying an injury, an illness, or the psychological wreckage of a previous event, the audience almost never learns it. Federations and organisers publish only what suits them. A withdrawal for health reasons is announced in one vague sentence. Nobody announces that a man slept four hours for three nights. Nobody announces medication. In twenty-two years of commentary I repeatedly knew something I could not say, commentating on games I knew were produced by a mind not functioning normally, while speaking of the moves as though born of a clear head. What I can do as a writer is choose the cases and technical details that reflect reality, even when reality is not public. I cannot publish a diagnosis. I can refuse to write a story I know to be false. And I can leave a space in every piece for what I do not know. A writer's honesty lies not in saying everything, but in not saying what he knows to be untrue. In every tournament piece I force myself to write at least one passage about something uninteresting. At Prague that was round five, when four of five Masters games ended in draws around move forty in positions where nothing happened. No combination. No serious error. Nothing worth replaying. Those games will never appear in an anthology. They took four hours from eight people. If we skip them, we skip most of this sport. Chess at the highest level is mostly a sequence of dull draws with a few memorable games scattered thinly between. A responsible writer must acknowledge the dullness, not because it is interesting, but because it is true. The most important detail in ChessBase Magazine 225 is also the smallest: the annotations are written by the players themselves. This is a tradition many publications abandoned for economic reasons. Inviting a world-class player to write a deep analysis of his own game is a major investment. It produces nothing that spreads quickly. It also produces something nothing else can: a view inside the mind of an elite player. A top player does not choose the best move. He chooses the move he believes he understands best, under the specific conditions of that game, with that much time left, in that mental state, knowing what he knows about the opponent. That is why human games differ from machine games. The machine chooses the best move. The human chooses a move he can live with. This is why I believe that in twenty years, when every game has been analysed to absolute precision, the value of players' own annotations will rise, not fall. The machine will tell you which move was right. It will never tell you why a human chose the wrong one. I do not think miniatures are bad. They have their own value, and that value is pedagogical. If I had to teach someone who had never played for three months, I would use twenty-seven miniatures. The problem appears only when you stay with the format too long. If after ten years you still learn mainly through miniatures, you develop a distorted skill set: you can recognise opportunity but not build it, you can finish an attack but not create one from a balanced position. Those players have beautiful games and poor tournaments. Among the Prague field was a Vietnamese-born grandmaster playing for the Czech Republic, raised in Prague, now one of Europe's leading grandmasters. I have never met him, but I have followed his games for years, and each time I think of something I rarely say aloud. Vietnamese athletes abroad carry a pressure locals do not: they must prove themselves twice, once as players and once as players of somewhere. In chess, where national identity is attached to the flag on the electronic board before every game, that pressure takes a concrete form. I have lived abroad twenty years and I know the feeling of being introduced as a journalist from a country that is not where I was born, while also being a person of a country that is not where I work. A contract is only paper, but a dream is signed in sweat. I wrote that years ago and was criticised for sentimentality. It holds in most cases. Documents dictate who you represent. Only the work dictates who you are. I want to end with a story that is not in issue 225. In a round-robin there are always games that are never played. Match-ups organisers considered and discarded. Encounters the public wanted but could not be scheduled. Pairs of players from the same generation who never met at their peaks. Chess has more unplayed games than any other sport, because it has no season in the team-sport sense. Every tournament is a small, curated set, and there are always gaps. In Prague there were ten players. Out of seven billion people, ten men sat opposite each other for nine days and produced roughly forty-five permanently recorded games. Twenty-seven of the shortest moments in world chess that year would be packaged into a section and delivered to readers. And hundreds of thousands of other games, in thousands of other tournaments, in hundreds of other countries, in the same period, vanished from human memory within the week they were played. That is not a tragedy. It is how memory works. We cannot remember everything, and selection is a condition of existence. But we can select better. We can choose to remember a game not because it ended in twenty moves, but because it explains something about how humans decide under pressure. We can choose to remember a player not for a moment but for a standard sustained over years. We can choose to remember a draw not because it was beautiful but because it was hard. And we can, each time we open a publication like ChessBase Magazine 225, remind ourselves that behind those twenty-seven miniatures lie long games nobody wrote about. That behind the names on the cover are people who sat four hours in an empty hall to produce a draw nobody remembers. That behind every player we call a legend is a seventeen-year-old who once sat down at a board knowing nothing of his own future. I came to Prague to listen. I heard a knight placed on wood, so softly that if I blinked I would have missed it. Eight years ago I heard the same sound at a reserve training pitch in Shanghai, and I skipped an editorial meeting to keep listening. I am still listening. After three decades holding a pen, I realise I have never once written about sport.