Item 745: One Product Page, Eight Openings, Zero Moves

Wednesday afternoon, Bengaluru. A notebook, a worn pencil, and a chess page open on the laptop. Since 2026 my habit has been to take an inventory before forming an opinion. On that page I counted: eight opening names, six videos, one International Master's name, and one number — 745.

Then I counted what was not there. The headline carried two names, Anish Giri and Nodirbek Abdusattorov. The game that headline was selling was nowhere on the page. No moves. No engine evaluation. No result. No date. Not a single sentence in the extracted text that could be tied to a board.

If this is a weekly series — and 'Game of the Week' says it is — then 745 weeks is fourteen years and four months. Which would place the first item around 2026. In that year Abdusattorov was six years old. Someone, somewhere, started a numbered series then, and it ran long enough that a player from it returned to its headline as world rapid champion.

The most reliable fact on the whole page is that number. Everything else is advertising.

Context: the cost of 2.c4, and the politics of avoiding it

In chess, after 1.d4 d5, the move 2.c4 is the door behind which four large families sit: the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen's Gambit Accepted, and the Orthodox Queen's Gambit Declined. Between them they have split into hundreds of branches over three decades. New lines are added to each sub-branch every year, and before any classical event a player's team spends the night rehearsing those lines.

A player who avoids 2.c4 abandons all four families at once. In exchange come structures like the London System, the Colle System, the Torre Attack, the Trompowsky Attack, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov — less theory, more structure, less preparation. This is not a new invention; it is chess's oldest economic insight. Whoever cannot buy memory buys structure.

Giri belongs in exactly this frame. For the past decade he has been among the very few top players whose identity is extreme solidity and a low probability of breaking. To my knowledge his classical rating sat around 2745-2750 at the end of 2026, against a career peak in the 2795-2805 band — figures pending verification and to be checked against the current FIDE list before any use. Abdusattorov, born in 2026, is the 2026 World Rapid Champion, and his rating curve is still climbing steeply. Stylistically this is the classic solidity-versus-dynamism matchup, and an ideal teaching pair, because the question is precisely how Black generates play against a low-risk White setup.

The videos are by IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer and an extremely prolific instructional producer. His title is legitimate, and in the chess education economy this is entirely normal — credibility here is built on volume of output rather than peak rating. Once that sentence is absorbed, expectations settle where they should: this is practical club-level guidance, not fresh elite analysis.

Taxonomy: a catalogue of names, or a designed curriculum

The page's first real crack is in its own list. The stated frame is clear — White does not play 2.c4 after 1.d4 d5. London, Colle, Torre and Blackmar-Diemer fit that frame cleanly.

The Catalan does not. The Catalan is by definition a 2.c4 opening: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2. A text that says White avoids 2.c4 cannot place the Catalan in the same list. One of two things is true: either this is move-order imprecision (a Catalan-like setup via 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.g3), or the list was padded.

The Trompowsky and the Richter-Veresov have a different problem. The Trompowsky is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5; the Richter-Veresov is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bg5. Both arise primarily against 1...Nf6, not against 1...d5. They sit outside the page's own frame.

This is where an educational product and an educational programme separate. A designed curriculum fixes the target first, then chooses the route with the fewest branches. A catalogue collects names first, then sells them together.

The real insight: where six are sold, two would do

The most important technical point about this page is the one not written on it, and it runs like this.

The Colle (2.Nf3 and 3.e3), the Torre (2.Nf3 and 3.Bg5), the London (2.Nf3 or 2.Bf4 and 3.e3) and the Richter-Veresov (2.Nc3 and 3.Bg5) are transpositionally entangled with one another. A single Black setup — …e6, …Bd6, …Nbd7, then …c6 or …c5 — meets all four. A coach building a coherent repertoire folds them into one plan.

But a 'one plan per opening' product structure sells six products where two would do the job. That is not fraud; it is product design, and it lands on the pocket of a buyer who does not know the same position is being sold four times under four names. This is the most useful conclusion available here, and it is absent from the page.

'Unambitious yet extremely dangerous' — the contradiction that sells

The page's rhetorical centre is an impossible sentence. In one place White's approach is called 'not very ambitious'; in another the same systems are 'extremely dangerous'. In chess language these two cannot stand together. A system that is objectively unambitious is precisely not dangerous against a prepared opponent; a system that is dangerous is, in practical terms, ambitious.

The resolution is that 'dangerous' here means dangerous to the unprepared, not dangerous in the engine's estimation. That distinction is legitimate. It just is not made explicit, because making it explicit reduces the fear, and the fear is the product. I have watched this formula for three decades: validate the reader's frustration, magnify the frustration into a threat, sell the remedy for the threat.

And how dangerous are these eight names, really?

The London System — yes. At 2700+ it is a genuine weapon, adopted by several top-ten players as a low-theory, high-pressure try. The Trompowsky — medium; creative grandmasters use it as a surprise. The Colle — low at elite classical level, higher in club and rapid play. The Torre — low. The Blackmar-Diemer — very low; objectively dubious above 2200, a clean pawn for development. The Richter-Veresov — very low. The Catalan — high, but it is not an anti-2.c4 system.

So of eight names on the list, exactly one is elite-grade, and it is the oldest name on the list. The other seven are club-market products, which is commercially fine and is not disclosed to the buyer.

Giri's presence is honest in this light, and accidentally excellent. The most solid player in the world is the most natural representative of low-theory systems. The headline draws more credibility from his name than the body earns.

What is missing is also information

No price, no date, no named publisher, and not one sample move. A buyer cannot check the quality of the analysis before buying. That is not unusual in the chess education economy, and it is precisely the sector's largest risk: no verifiable claim exists, and the buyer has only trust.

This is where my 2026 experiment comes back. In a 200-square-foot room in Indiranagar, with two lamps and a second-hand microphone, I began a twelve-part video essay on the National Premier 'A'. The federation never credentialed me, so I bought a 150-rupee ticket, sat in row six, and filmed nothing. Episodes ran fourteen to eighteen minutes; eleven of the twelve drew fewer than 900 views. Episode nine — an eleven-year-old from Chennai named Gukesh, beaten in 34 moves in round three — drew 26,000.

That experiment taught me something that applies directly to this page: one child's loss travels further than a champion's win, because it contains a human instant. This product has no instant. That is likely why it cannot fully teach the thing it claims to teach — how to generate play against a low-theory setup — because teaching that requires standing at one board and showing the silence after one particular move.

And I remember the 2026 Bengaluru sports desk, where I was the only woman among nineteen writers and the only one who had ever filed from a chess hall. My 900-word column from the National Premier 'A' — fourteen players, average age 23, about sixty chairs in the gallery, one tea counter — out-read that day's ISL match report by 3,000 page views. The next one was cut to 400 words and moved to page 19. I resigned in November, three weeks after watching forty minutes of ChessBase India's first YouTube broadcast.

The real issue: this is not a talent question, it is a memory market

The easy conclusion is that the page is clickbait, that the headline lies, and that such products should be avoided. I find that uninteresting.

The collective memory's real blind spot is that we still read the anti-theory opening market as a talent question, when it is entirely a question of memory economics. Every new Semi-Slav line adds a customer to this market. This product's real competitor is not another course; it is next month's Semi-Slav update. The more theory inflates, the more anti-theory products sell. The ecosystem runs by itself, and this page is a small, well-furnished part of it — item 745.

The second blind spot is the word 'unambitious'. We have called the London System unambitious for decades while it remains the only elite-grade weapon on this list. A London player does not abandon ambition; he cuts the memory cost and spends the saved energy in the middlegame. Covering Anand-Kramnik in Bonn in 2026, I saw this most clearly — the difference between a prepared and an unprepared player shows in the chair, not on the score sheet.

The third point may be the uncomfortable one: the buyer is not a fool. He is buying reassurance, not analysis. That is why quality criticism does not dent products of this kind. Someone who wants relief from fear does not care about engine verification.

Here I have to restrain an old habit. Every elegy must cost something on the page, or it collapses into atmosphere. It is easy to mourn the era of the print chess column, and the present picture also includes this: after 2026 the sport's reach arrived where a 2026 column could never go. ChessBase India's roughly 2.9 million YouTube subscribers, an ordinary opening video reaching a teenager in Guwahati or Kanpur — that was impossible in the old arrangement. What is still missing is not audience. It is long-form memory.

Two signals to watch

The first is the date. If the bundle predates 2026, the London and Trompowsky sections predate the engine-driven reassessments, and their practical value drops sharply. The second is the sample. If the Giri-Abdusattorov game in the headline exists with move-by-move annotation and engine figures, the product's technical credibility changes entirely. The absence of both is itself a warning.

And then the point that will reshape this whole category in three to five years. 'A plan against opening X' is the most easily machine-generated category in chess education. The long-run relevance of a product like this will therefore sit not in its plans but in its accountability — whether it says which line belongs to which version, where it came from, and to what engine depth it was checked.

Finally, my own print test on the phrase 'extremely dangerous'. Read it cold on paper, no thumbnail, no link, no red arrow. What survives? An adjective. Now replace it with: the London System, at 2700+, played this many times in recent database years. The second sentence survives. The first does not. The rule held in Rostov-on-Don in July 2026 too — the line spoken from a gantry 42 metres up, the one 300,000 people heard in a 38-second clip, had been tested on the page first. A line that dies in print does not survive the microphone either.

The question is not whether item 745 is clickbait. The question is whether, by item 900, there will be a move recorded on that page — and if there is, whether a human being stands behind it or only a list.