The 2026 Chess Season: Twenty-Seven Short Games and the Art of Self-Annotation

The twenty-third game of the spring chess festival ended on move twenty-two. The player with the black pieces set his queen down on the board the way one lays down a flower that has already wilted, then covered his eyes with his hand. No one applauded. Inside the hall there was only the scrape of chairs and the scratch of the secretary's nib across the scoresheet. The queen sacrifice on move eighteen carried no chance of salvation; it was a confession written in calm handwriting. Across the whole festival, people counted twenty-seven short games — games in which the idea rose and went out within thirty or forty moves, leaving just enough behind for the onlooker to regret.

The title was only the tip of it. The real value of the season lay in the annotated collection of scoresheets, the kind that would still be read long after the standings had gone stale. In the late eighties, a player who wanted to improve had only a few sources: opening books, specialist magazines, and those volumes of collected games written by grandmasters themselves. The need was not new. Ever since the world championship match of 2026 in Reykjavik, when the whole world waited on every move, reading the players' own annotations became part of chess culture. In Vietnam, few had the means to reach such material; most students in the north learned the game by copying out the games of their elders by hand and replaying them alone on a wooden board. When a seventeen-year-old prodigy still did not know he was about to become a legend, he read those books the way one reads scripture, never suspecting that in a few years his name would sit on the next page.

This year's festival gave the chess world ten new opening monographs and twenty-seven memorable short games. Its true asset was something harder to package: the way the leading players told their own stories.

The core point the specialists drew from the season: the greatest value of a game lies not in its result but in the account given by the player himself. When a grandmaster annotates his own game, the reader is not handed an answer — he is handed a way of asking questions. A move presented together with hesitation, a pause before the queen leaves its square, a line like 'I saw this from move fifteen' is worth more than any dry table of variations. That is why a festival that produces many short games is more useful than a tournament full of long draws: the idea is laid bare, not buried beneath meticulous technique.

For the student of the game, the lesson splits into four layers. The opening is not a fixed set of formulas but a wardrobe re-tailored every season; ten new monographs from the festival are enough for any club player to build a catalogue of his own. Tactics demand an eye that sees two moves ahead, yet the art of calculation lies in knowing when to stop calculating. Strategy teaches that the strongest piece is not the one that moves most but the one standing on the right square. And the endgame — the part beginners dismiss as the dullest — is where the game is decided by pure skill, once no decorative idea is left to cling to.

I still carry a small notebook recording every move of the short games, not to preserve the result but to preserve the breathing of the player holding the pieces. Based on my experience watching games across so many seasons, a good game leaves its mark on the player's hands, not on the scoresheet.

There is a blind spot collective memory tends to skip. Spectators remember the twenty-two-move miniature, remember the brilliant queen sacrifice, and forget that most of the most instructive games are defeats — the ones in which a player dares to admit he miscalculated from move twelve. The worth of an annotated collection lies in letting those who come later see failure written down honestly, not in glorifying the winner. A mistake retold with care can teach more than ten flawless victories. The most romantic mistake of mine was believing that a ball knows how to write poetry — in chess I once believed the same, until I realised the pieces do not ring out on their own; only a human being, setting one down, can make that happen.

After three decades at the desk, I have realised I was never writing about sport. I was writing about how people accept defeat, then sit down to annotate for others how they lost. The spring festival of 2026 will pass, the standings will grow old, but those twenty-seven short games will keep the sound of the pen scratching on paper — because one man chose to stop, and to tell us why.