Prague Beyond the Screen: Chess's Training Market and 27 Miniatures

It is two in the morning in a room in Mymensingh. A chess board glows on the laptop screen, and I have paused the frame just before a move — the move someone in Prague perhaps spent ten minutes weighing. That distance is my only instrument. What you cannot see sitting in a stadium, you catch sitting on the far side of a screen: who gets broadcast, who does not, and why the board is never merely a board. From a Mymensingh bedroom, I learned the stadium is only a screen. Chess has always been played in empty stadiums — I wrote that in 2026, when over-the-board chess stopped completely under Covid and our federation's already-thin calendar collapsed first. But this time the question is different. When the game itself becomes a product — when analysis, commentary and training material are sold in a separate market — what does that market's internal structure look like? ChessBase Magazine's 225th issue, built around the Prague Chess Festival 2026, forced me to ask exactly that. ChessBase Magazine is nothing new. The German software company ChessBase has published it for decades. The model is simple but effective: tournament games, opening-theory articles, and annotations written by the players themselves. This issue's Prague Chess Festival 2026 analyses come from names like Anish Giri, David Navara, Aravindh Chithambaram and Ediz Gurel. Opening videos are presented by Werle, King and Ris. There is a special section of 27 miniatures, and 10 opening articles offering repertoire-building material for club-level players. Two things catch the eye immediately. First, the contributor list paints a geographic picture: Dutch, Czech, Indian and Turkish names together. Second, the delivery format — download, PDF booklet, a printed booklet by post, and a separate edition for iPad and tablet. That second point is not mere marketing; it is an industry signal. Take the first point. Giri, Navara, Aravindh — that list is itself a statement, because it places two different generations side by side. On one side Navara, Czech number one for many years, strong in classical chess, and a skilled annotator of his own games, rated around 2680 to 2700, a settled late-career plateau. On the other side Aravindh, part of India's post-2026 wave, now knocking on the 2700 door. Their presence in one issue is no accident. The publisher is deliberately courting two reader generations — long-time subscribers and younger followers. Giri's name adds an extra dimension, because Giri is known for extreme solidity and a high draw rate. Annotating his games often means a lesson in patience rather than attack. For training material this cuts both ways. Readers hunting tactical complexity may find his pages cool; readers learning patient structure will find few better teachers. But for me the real signal is India's presence. Aravindh is presented not as a participant but as an established elite name. In the media world that is a quiet recognition. Bangladesh gave South Asia its first grandmaster in 2026 through Niaz Murshed — a year before Anand — and thinking about that moment still hurts. India built a pipeline; we built a monument. When a name like Aravindh now sits in an elite training product's roster, that is the pipeline bearing fruit. A structural question follows. Who makes training material, and why? ChessBase's model is to commission elite players directly as authors. When Giri or Navara annotate their own games, depth of writing is one thing — the business side is another. The company need not re-annotate third-party games, and the copyright position stays clean. That is not luck; it is deliberate design. Here I see a pattern that may teach our own country something. In cricket we are used to talk of transfer windows and franchise drafts. Chess is not like that. Players here are club-based, hold day jobs, and talent grows through the school curriculum. When a company like ChessBase turns the player into the author, the training market becomes a dual system: one player is at once competitor and teacher. That model is ChessBase's real asset, and it is not easily copied. Now the second point — delivery. Download, PDF, printed booklet, tablet edition: this variety is no accident. The whole media world is shifting from print toward hybrid digital, and ChessBase's strategy mirrors it. No single vehicle suffices now, because readers want both the durability of print and the searchability of digital. A publisher stuck in one format will lose readers. Here I want to read a signal that is easy to miss. ChessBase's main rival is not another magazine. Its rival is the free platform — Lichess, YouTube, open databases. An ambitious club player can now travel much of the road alone with an engine and an online database, without spending a penny. So why pay for ChessBase? The answer is probably a kind of soft power — the power of names. Anyone can analyse the game Giri or Navara annotates with an engine, but the engine will not tell you what Giri was thinking. That gap is the training market's real capital. Yet exactly here lies a danger I hear discussed too little. The danger is this: when explanation becomes an exclusive product, knowledge is bound into a value chain. A mediating structure grows between the understanding inside a player's head and the reader's money. That structure is not bad, but we should remember that training material is never neutral truth. It is one person's reading, one person's selection, one person's interest. This is where the special section of 27 miniatures becomes most curious to me. A miniature is a short game, usually finished within 25 to 30 moves. ChessBase has kept this kind of section for years. But notice where its value lies. A short, quickly finished game is pleasant to watch, viewer-friendly. For learning deep strategy, long and complex positional struggles do more. The miniature is therefore more an entertainment feature than a training one. The contradiction is not accidental. A magazine must be teacher and entertainer at once. Pure textbook and subscribers drift away; pure entertainment and serious club players laugh. So the editorial strategy is a blend — 10 opening articles on one side, 27 miniatures on the other. That balance is the condition of survival for a training product. The tilt toward opening theory is no accident either. Opening knowledge is the best-selling product in the training market, because that is where uncertainty is greatest and the promise most deceptive. A player believes that learning one new line will push him forward. So the opening repertoire is a permanent market, and it sits at the centre of this issue. But here I smell a second danger, larger still. My suspicion about how the game's information is becoming data is old. I am not talking about betting. I am saying that when every move becomes a number and every position becomes an evaluation, part of the game cannot be recovered. Training material is the politest face of that conversion — but the work is the same. Still, it would be unfair to stop here. The conventional view deserves a fair hearing. It is the mainstream belief: an institution like ChessBase adds stable value to the chess world. It opens an income path for elite players even after they stop competing. A whole tier of player-teachers depends on this market. That cannot and should not be denied. That view holds — if you assume the quality of training material is independently verifiable. The problem is that this issue's promotional language — world-class players analyse their brilliant games — is a marketing claim, not independent proof. We get no price, no subscriber count, no sales figures. On the product's true quality we are forced to trust the author's word. Now to what I consider most important. If I look at the training market from a witness point — from Mymensingh — the picture changes. Here, chess talent is lost to a missing federation budget, absent corporate patronage, and a school pipeline gone dry. Our federation budget is smaller than a bat sponsor's fee. Yet in the West a training magazine stands on its own feet, backed by a whole elite economy. This contrast stops me most. On one side is a carefully built product, with names like Giri writing analysis. On the other is a country where a seventeen-year grandmaster drought taught a generation that talent without structure amounts to nothing. Both realities happen on the same planet, at the same time. The more mature the training market, the sharper the talent-pipeline gap becomes. Batumi arrived through remote control, and the game became a signal I could pause. Today Prague reaches me the same way — as a screen, a file, a PDF. But that gives me an advantage a board-side reporter lacks. I can pause, rewind, watch again. Who gets broadcast and who is left out — I can ask that by freezing a single frame. That question is my real interest. Who gets a place in the training market, and who does not? Look closely at the list — Giri, Navara, Aravindh, Gurel — and one thing is clear. Those who got in come from a geographic circle where chess structures are strong. Dutch, Czech, Indian, Turkish. Names arrive from the countries where chess can be a livelihood. India's presence is the most significant. It proves how fast a country can produce results once it builds structures. Aravindh is not merely a talented player; he is the crop of a method. India is becoming a talent-exporting power, and that wave has now reached the pages of elite training material. A country once peripheral in chess now supplies central names to others' training markets. So if we turn back to ourselves, the question sharpens. Do we have no story of disappointment? We do. But alongside it are freshly born signals. In 2026, Neer took the national title at fourteen. In 2026, at fifty-nine, Niaz Murshed took it again. I will never accept these as feel-good endings. They are a position — one to be converted, not celebrated. The training market's reality makes the conditions for that conversion plain. An elite training magazine survives only with corporate patronage, an income path for players, and a living school pipeline behind it. In our country at least two of those three are nearly absent. Importing training material is easy; producing a generation is hard. Here I want to take a medium risk and think ahead. Suppose a product like ChessBase one day takes another shape — an interactive app, or an AI-assisted teacher. What then? Training will likely become more personal, more solitary. And that solitude is most dangerous in countries like ours, where chess lives as a society, a club culture. This is where the gap opens between conventional expectation and my reading. The received idea is that good training material means good progress. But training material works only when a system surrounds it — clubs, coaches, competition, patronage. Training material is not a substitute for that system; it is only a complement. That truth gets lost in promotional language. So the question returns to where I stood in 2026, annotating every round of the National Championship from a Mymensingh bedroom, working from PGN files on a borrowed laptop. That was the start of a movement — writing positions instead of results. Today, opening ChessBase's 225th issue, I understand the training-market question must be read the same way: who writes, who buys, and who is left out. Here I reach a small but firm conclusion. Chess is played in empty stadiums, true. But the training market is never empty — competition there is fierce. Free platforms, engines, video: all are fighting for the same reader's time and money. An institution like ChessBase can rely only on names and the power of explanation. That strength is not fleeting, but it is not permanent either. So what is the next move? Watch two things, I would say. First, which way the contributor roster tilts — whether more Indian and younger names appear. Second, whether the delivery format changes — whether any interactive or AI-based feature arrives. Together they will tell us whether the training market is merely surviving, or transforming. The games of Prague Chess Festival 2026 will age; their news value will fall. But as training material their lifespan is long. That difference is the real lesson. A training product is not news; it is a memory — one that returns to be read anew. The only question is which memory is preserved, and which is lost. The night in Mymensingh is ending. The board on the screen still glows, and I know I will return to this same place tomorrow. The Online Olympiad taught me that empty stadiums are where chess always lived. In the age of the training market, that home is now becoming a shop. The question now is this: in the shop's light, how much will we see, and how much will stay in shadow.