From Tsaghkadzor to 9...a5: A Correct Headline, a Mismatched Body, and a Data-Free Promise

The headline is about the European Schools Chess Champions in Tsaghkadzor. The body is about a move called 9...a5. I read the headline three times, read the body once, then sat still in the kitchen. Those two things do not belong together.

I have mispronounced a player's name, then read the position correctly the moment the replay rolled back in front of my eyes. This time it was the reverse. I read the headline correctly, and discovered the content underneath was about something else entirely: a chess opening DVD, sold to King's Indian Defense players who are being squeezed by the Bayonet weapon.

One is a junior event in Armenia, with an opening ceremony and a “cultural celebration”. The other is a tactical product sold to club players. No thread connects them. For someone who has worked in this trade for 44 years, this is the kind of error that keeps me awake, because it is small enough that people skip past it, and the things people skip past are usually what destroy the credibility of an entire news site.

I am not writing this to attack a DVD. I am writing because that DVD teaches something interesting, and that headline teaches something more frightening.

The King's Indian Defense, and why White invented a bayonet

Briefly, for new readers. The King's Indian Defense, KID for short, is one of the strangest systems in chess. Black deliberately concedes the centre to White, builds a wall of pieces with a bishop on g7, and waits. Waits for White to build a big, unwieldy centre, then stabs into it with ...e5 and ...c5. This is the hypermodern school, where you win by letting your opponent take space and then collapse on his own.

Its main line for decades has been called Mar del Plata. The key move is 7...Nc6, and the consequence is a two-wing race: White throws pieces at the queenside, Black throws pieces at the kingside, and whoever arrives first wins. A typical sequence: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2 e5 7.0-0 Nc6 8.d5 Ne7. White closes the centre with 8.d5, Black retreats the knight to e7 to prepare ...f5. From here, White has a weapon the trade calls the Bayonet Attack: 9.b4.

I remember the feeling of first analysing 9.b4 on the board. It is crude. It is not elegant. But it works: White pushes the b-pawn to b4, prepares Ba3 and b5, and rips open Black's queenside before Black can open the kingside. The Bayonet was a weapon for many leading White players in the 1990s, and it turned Mar del Plata from a gamble into a nightmare for Black players who like to read ahead.

Garry Kasparov once turned the KID into an attacking weapon for Black at the top level. Vladimir Kramnik belongs to the generation that brought the Bayonet into White's arsenal. And even the generation of Magnus Carlsen still uses the KID as a surprise. The system does not die; it just passes from hand to hand, carrying the same old question: how does Black survive the queenside storm.

Black must have an answer. The orthodox answer, the most popular one, written into the textbooks, is 9...Nh5. It opens the position, pushes the knight to the rim, threatens ...f5 and ...Nf4, and forces both sides into concrete, long, mandatory lines, where one wrong move on move twenty costs you the whole game.

And this is where that DVD walks in.

9...a5: an old move repackaged as new stock

The product proposes a different answer: 9...a5. Black pushes the a-pawn, immediately attacking White's b4-pawn, gaining space, and preparing ...c5 or ...Be6. This is no invention. The move 9...a5 has appeared sporadically at the top level as a way to regain tempo and space, a move that has existed in the database for a long time.

What is new is the packaging. The product does not sell you an objective edge. It sells you an escape. It says that 9...Nh5 opens the position and forces Black to memorise a colossal volume of lines, more than a club player has time to learn. It adds that 9...a5 leads to positions with fewer mandatory lines, where strategy matters more than memory. And it says the most striking thing of all: in those complex strategic positions, computers often do not know how to handle it.

That last sentence made me sit up. I spent two months of the 2026 lockdown re-watching twenty classic games, taking notes on every closed position. I learned one thing: modern computers, from Stockfish to Leela, handle the strategic positions of the KID very well. They do not panic at a closed centre. They evaluate those positions with stable numbers, and those numbers keep getting sharper.

The promise that “computers do not understand” is weakening with every engine version. A product that sells you peace of mind against computers loses value as computers grow calmer. That is the paradox of the whole product line: the later it comes, the harder it sells.

When Black chooses 9...Nh5, the game enters an almost mandatory sequence: ...f5, ...Nf4, White pushes g4, both sides fight on the kingside while the queenside is still burning. One wrong move here is usually punished within a few moves. When Black chooses 9...a5, the tempo slows. Black does not need to recall move eighteen exactly; Black needs to understand that the queenside will open, that ...c5 is coming, that the bishop will come out to ...Be6. These are two philosophies, not two variations of the same game.

In the chess trade, opening products are a strange market. Buyers do not buy to win one specific game. They buy to be less afraid. The biggest fear of a club player is not losing, but being dragged into a line the opponent has memorised and they have not. Every successful opening product sells release from that fear.

Not a single number

I read the entire content. There is no engine match rate. There is no ACPL, average centipawn loss per move. There is no win rate, no draw rate, no sample size, no name of a single game, no name of a single player. There is no author's name.

If you are selling an opening line and claiming it is better than the orthodox 9...Nh5, you have to prove it. You have to produce a database, a sample, a win rate at the 2600 level. You have to show me what percentage 9...a5 scores when Black knows the plans. This product offers nothing. It only asserts. And that assertion is called advertising, not analysis.

I ask questions that do not sound like a woman, but the answers they dodge do not sound like a man. Here, both the question and the answer are missing. There is only a claim hanging in the air.

I do not deny the value of 9...a5. It may be a good practical choice. It saves study time, it leads to human-friendly positions, and for a club player who meets the Bayonet a few times a year, that may be enough. But “enough for a small group” and “better than the main line” are two different sentences. Blending them is how people sell.

I was in that press room in 2026, when the whole room went silent and I asked a question nobody wanted to hear. They laughed. Then the next match, the team lost exactly because of the flaw I had pointed out. I learned that criticism only has value when it comes with a number to shut up the people who doubt your competence. This product has no number to shut anyone up. It only has a belief.

The real buyer of this product is not a grandmaster

Be honest about the audience. A player at the 2700 level does not buy this DVD. They have an analysis team, a coach, a database updated weekly. The buyer is a strong club player, 1800 to 2200, who runs into the Bayonet now and then and feels stunned.

For that person, this product is genuinely useful. But useful in a different way than advertised: useful as a psychological crutch, a story to believe they do not need to memorise a thousand lines. That need is real. I do not look down on it. An entire chess coaching industry lives on that need.

But if I were the seller, I would say it plainly: this is a practical line for club players, freeing you from memorisation. I would not say computers do not understand. The second sentence sells more in the short term and bankrupts your credibility in the long term. In this trade, credibility is the only asset that cannot be bought back with advertising.

An old format, a new problem

There is another layer few notice: the disc. An opening product packaged as a static DVD is a sign of a distribution model growing old. Modern opening knowledge flows through subscription platforms like Chessable, through online lessons, through interactive databases that can be updated after every new engine build.

A DVD cannot be updated. When an engine revises its evaluation of a line, your disc still sits there, as confident as day one. That is a structural disadvantage, not a small detail. That empty stadium years ago, I found a tactical diagram lying quietly under a seat instead of the roar of the crowd. Here too: I found an old diagram lying quietly inside an old format.

One fair point must be made. If the author of this product is a famous grandmaster specialising in the KID, its value jumps instantly. The teacher's reputation is part of the data. But in the entire content I read, there is no author's name. An opening product that hides the name of its teacher is a product shooting itself in the foot.

Where I could be wrong

To be fair to myself, I must state where my argument could break.

I may have misjudged the importance of 9...a5. It may be a rising line, picked up again by young grandmasters, and I simply have not kept up. Chess changes faster than a 60-year-old can follow.

It is also possible that the computer claim is not the product's main argument. Perhaps I am reading it through a short blurb, cut from context, and the author does have data in a full version I do not have.

And there is one more possibility, the most important: perhaps that headline is the truth, and the body I read is a technical error of the system. A news site stitched two different articles into one place. If so, I am dissecting a product based on an article that does not exist in that form.

I say this because I believe in a principle: a critic must draw his own exit route before others draw it for him. Mistakes are not frightening. Bending down to pick up the tape at 2 a.m. is what makes a forecaster.

So what is the real story

There are two stories in the same file.

The small story: a DVD teaching 9...a5 against the Bayonet, packaging a practical choice as an overblown promise. This is normal. The whole opening industry does it. I am not angry about it.

The big story: an article whose headline is about the European schools championship in Tsaghkadzor and whose body is about a DVD. No author, no date, no source. In a trade where readers are drowning in rumour, a mix-up like that is a crack. And small cracks in information are what make readers turn away from an entire news site, not the big mistakes.

I have worked in this trade for 44 years. I have cursed coaches, cursed federations, cursed the way a news item is edited. But I have never cursed a product just because it lacks data. I curse it because it does not admit that.

Silent applause can kill emotion, but it cannot kill strategy. And a wrong headline can kill trust faster than any big lie.

What I will track

I set myself a promise that can be verified, and I invite you to hold me to it.

Over the next twelve months, I will track whether 9...a5 appears in a top-level event, at 2600 or above, with a player who knows what he is doing. If it appears, and if it scores, I will write a piece saying I underrated it. I will not apologise for my tone, but I will correct myself with data.

If it does not appear, then that product is still right for a small group of readers, but not right for the reason it advertises. And that headline remains an unpatched crack.

Ten years in the middle of the argument, the fire lit by that question in 2026 still burns. I still ask the questions nobody wants to hear. And I still read the body carefully before I believe the headline.