Miniatures and Berlins

When one becomes seriously interested in chess, one begins to seek out example games.....and there are so many! But, as time wanders on, a trend begins to emerge among these games: Most of them terminate in a middlegame position before the 30th move - they're 'miniatures', short games featuring daring attack maneauvers, sacrifices, traps, and checkmates. All fine things....all things we have to face in our own games, but are these games actually preparing us to play better chess? The fact is, large quantities of our games will terminate in difficult endings where we have to make precise decisions about king placement and which pawn to push......very tough stuff...tough stuff advertised to the chess community (by its own members) as 'boring'.

Paul Morphy is the hero of 'interesting' chess - the above game is a mere 17 moves, Morphy plays the king's gambit, sacrifices a rook and a knight, doesn't castle, moves his queen immediately, and wins....total control of the entire game! On the other side of the coin is the Berlin defense - loathed because it trades queens in theory and gears up for a 110 move game with a high draw percentage. But when I look through games to improve my chess, these Morphy miniatures seem to offer nothing applicable in practical play....I can't recall a single moment where I looked at the board and said "Oh, Morphy did something like this!" And when I look through Berlins played by Magnus Carlsen, I find them extremely educational - he works slowly to create exact harmony, and walks his opponent backward inch by inch until they collapse. 

The point here isn't "Morphy bad, Carlsen good," it's that miniatures are overrepresented, shown as the great 'brilliancies' of our game at the expense of the subtle poetry in games such as the one above, and I think we should all be reminded here and there that harmony may, in fact, win more games than sac-sac-mate. 

Thanks for reading!