Seven Systems, Six Videos and a Misnamed Catalan: Inside the Opening-Course Market

Thursday night, in a small chess club tucked down an alley off Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street, I sat behind a nineteen-year-old boy. He had the black pieces. Across the board, his opponent opened 1.d4, then 2.Nf3, 3.Bf4 — the London System. No combination. No sacrifice. Just moves falling as evenly as the breathing of a sleeping man.

By move twenty, the boy still had every piece. The position was so balanced an engine would have scored it near perfect. But his clock had evaporated forty minutes. He began making pointless moves — pushing a pawn that needed no pushing, trading a rook for nothing. He lost on move thirty-four. Not to a tactic, but to not knowing what to do next.

Chess players call that a death by drift. You do not lose because your position is bad. You lose because you have no plan.

That is why I stopped for a long while in front of a course product being promoted across international chess forums. The original piece carried the headline "The right king road" — almost certainly a machine translation of the German idiom "der richtige Königsweg," meaning "the right royal road." The phrasing says a great deal: the source text comes from a German-language chess shop or blog, and its nature is product promotion, not reporting.

The product is a six-part instructional video series by IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. Its subject: building a Black setup after 1...d5 against the seven opening systems White commonly uses to dodge the mainline Queen's Gambit theory — the Colle, Trompowsky, Torre, London, Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer and Richter-Veresov.

The sales pitch turns on a paradox: White picks these systems because they are "not very ambitious," yet they are "extremely dangerous" to anyone unprepared. It sounds contradictory. It is not. For the player of the black pieces, the danger is not falling into a bad position — it is being dragged into a game with no direction.

That is the point I want to dissect first, because it decides the product's real value.

Plans, not moves

At the technical level, this is a plans course. Each video presents one strategic idea for Black in one system. There is no claim of a novelty never seen in a database, no engine analysis sample, no win-draw-loss statistics.

For players under 2026, that is a sound pedagogical choice — often better than cramming variations. For players above 2200, its value falls away quickly. A plan survives only when the opponent is also playing plan-chess. Against someone who knows the concrete lines, the gaps show at once.

I have spent years sitting in grassroots chess clubs, where a game is usually decided not by a combination but by who forgets the position first. Based on my experience watching those tournaments, one thing is clear: most club-level players lose in the opening not because they play a wrong move, but because once the opening ends, they no longer know what they are doing.

Seven systems, six videos

Here is the largest technical crack. The numbers do not match. Seven systems are named, but there are only six videos.

The first two — the Colle (ECO D04–D05) and the Torre (D03) — demand very little theory. The Trompowsky (A45) and the London (D02) sit in the middle. But the Catalan (E00–E09) is something else entirely.

The problem is that the Catalan is mislabelled. The original piece files the Catalan under "systems where White dodges Queen's Gambit theory." That is wrong. The Catalan requires White to play c4 — precisely 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2 — meaning White accepts a walk straight into the densest mainline theory there is. It is not an avoidance system. It is one of the hardest defences Black must face.

One-sixth of a video series' runtime cannot hold the Catalan. This is almost certainly the thinnest module in the product, and the likeliest source of buyer disappointment.

There is a move-order issue too. The real Trompowsky appears on move two — 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 — before Black commits to ...d5. The "1...d5 then see" frame hides a genuine move-order decision. And the Blackmar-Diemer (D00) is a romantic gamble with 1.d4 d5 2.e4, not a quiet system like the Colle or London. Grouping it with the Colle mixes two different strategic categories.

The gap outside the frame

A Black repertoire built on the "1...d5 plus plans" frame will automatically miss systems that reach the same structures by other routes. Most notable is the Jobava-Prie London — 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bf4, named after Baadur Jobava — one of the most popular systems at both club and grandmaster level for more than a decade. Alongside it are the g3/Bg2 setups without c4.

None of them appear in the promotional text. Whether they are covered in the videos, the text does not say. But if they are not, the buyer ends up holding an anti-1.d4 repertoire with two holes right at the door.

The numbers that do not exist

What struck me most was what was left unwritten.

No ACPL — average centipawn loss per move against the engine's best. No engine match rate. No sample game. No independent review. Every "fact" in the piece is the seller's word.

On the author, only two fragments are available: "IM" and "Bulgarian trainer." No rating, no title date, no recent tournament activity. In the online-course market, an author's title works as a positioning signal. IM-authored courses usually target club players; grandmaster-authored courses, tested at the board, aim at the 2100-plus segment. This product sits in the first tier.

The phrase "one plan per opening" is entirely consistent with another possibility: the author is re-narrating engine output rather than sharing experience tested in real competition. That is not an accusation, but it is a transparency gap left unfilled.

When the pitch outruns the board

There is something subtle in the way the advertising is built that a reader easily misses. The benefit is not real; the target is.

The phrase "extremely dangerous" is backed by no data at all. It rests on a single line: "many chess players have painfully experienced it." That is a targeting device, not a factual claim. It works by inviting the reader to see himself in it — the club player who keeps losing to the London System.

And in a sense, it works. Because the pain is real.

But the true value of an opening product does not lie in the pain it mines, but in the boundary of its promise. The promise here is "easing the pain," not "gaining an advantage." Anyone reading "extremely dangerous" as an objective evaluation will mis-calibrate their own expectations.

Echoes from an empty stand

In Vietnam, grassroots chess tournaments are usually held in halls with no spectators. People sit facing each other, clocks ticking, pieces meeting wood. No cheering. No cameras. Only players and players.

An empty stand still has an echo — if only we are quiet enough to hear it.

That echo tells me the opening-course market is not a scam, but a natural consequence of a chess culture chasing visible results. When players have no coach, they buy plans. When they have no arena to test them, they buy belief. And when free supply — opening databases, analysis engines — is saturated, the only thing left to sell is the retelling.

The buyer's trap

The biggest risk of this kind of product is not content quality. It is expectation mismatch.

A buyer thinks he is purchasing a complete repertoire against 1.d4. He is purchasing seven modules, one of which — the Catalan — demands more theory than all the others combined. The arithmetic gave it away in advance: seven systems, six videos, and one system filed under the wrong category.

The second risk is substitutability. Most of the product's underlying information can be looked up free through opening databases and analysis engines. The exclusive value lies in the plan layer, not the move layer.

The third risk is obsolescence. The product carries no clear release date. If the recording predates the Jobava-London wave, well-read club opponents will find it dated.

And the final, systemic risk is value decay. As opening-course content grows easier to produce with automated tools, prices will compress. What remains defensible is only pedagogical clarity and experience tested in practice.

What is worth keeping

I still want to say one fair thing about this product.

The list of seven systems in the pitch is, in itself, a useful checklist for anyone holding the black pieces. Colle, Trompowsky, Torre, London, Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer, Richter-Veresov — those are seven questions a club-level player will certainly meet, and seven questions most players cannot answer in full.

If a buyer sees this product as what it is — a plans course, not a theoretical reference — it still has a place. A 1600 player who understands the plan against the London will improve faster than a 1600 player who memorises twenty moves of a line without knowing why.

Generations will pass, but the poem about them keeps being written.

I think of that nineteen-year-old boy on Thursday night. He lacked no talent. He lacked a plan, and someone to show him what that plan might look like. In a chess culture with empty stands, every course written is trying to fill part of that gap — though not every course fills the right part.

What readers need, perhaps, is not another promise of danger. It is an honest map of what they do not yet know.