Six Videos, Seven Openings: When Club Chess Becomes an Advertising Market

At a grassroots chess tournament in Shenzhen last weekend, I sat beside a 1,850-rated player. He had just lost his third straight game to White's London System. Every game he left the opening with a balanced position. Then he drifted — no obvious blunder, he simply did not know where to place his pieces. When I asked whether he remembered Black's plan, he laughed: "I only know the first three moves." That laugh is a market. In chess, club players are fooling themselves into believing that memorising moves is enough.

The product I want to examine is a video course by IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. It does not teach White to attack. It teaches Black what to do when White opens 1.d4 but skips 2.c4 — the group analysts call anti-Queen's Gambit. By declining 2.c4, White sidesteps the dense theory of the Queen's Gambit Declined, the Slav and the Semi-Slav. Instead, White chooses one of seven systems: Colle, London, Torre, Trompowsky, Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer and Richter-Veresov.

Here is the crux before anyone spends money: the marketing says the course offers "a relevant plan for Black in each single opening." Seven systems are listed, but there are only six videos. That simple subtraction is explained nowhere. Four systems appear at the start; three more — Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer and Richter-Veresov — are added at the end. That asymmetry is the first sign that this is not a complete theoretical work but a survey of ideas.

The real strength of the product lies elsewhere. It sells no new moves. It sells the answer to one question: once the opening ends, what does Black do? Against the Colle (1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3), the Torre (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Bg5) and the Blackmar-Diemer (1.d4 d5 2.e4), a few dozen concrete moves plus a plan will do. That is sound pedagogy for players below 2,000 Elo.

But the biggest technical problem is not the Colle. It is the Catalan. The Catalan (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5) is a mainline, theory-dense opening — not a sideline system. When White plays the Catalan, White is not avoiding 2.c4; White plays c4 and walks straight into the theoretical territory the course claims White is fleeing. Filing the Catalan alongside the London and the Colle is a categorisation error, not an editorial choice.

The consequence is concrete: one sixth of the runtime cannot contain the Catalan. Black needs a genuine repertoire decision — the Open Catalan (accepting dxc4 and following with b5, Bb4+) or the closed structure (Nbd7, c6, b6). Those two roads lead to positions that are different in kind. One video cannot teach both, and certainly cannot teach enough for a buyer to walk into a classical game with confidence.

The difficulty spread across the six videos is also uneven. Colle and Torre demand little. Trompowsky and London require accuracy against early ideas such as c5, Ne4 and h6. The Catalan demands the most. When a product bundles three levels into one package, buyers are effectively paying for one strong module and several thin ones.

There is another gap visible from the outside. The 1...d5-plus-plans frame omits systems that reach the same structures by other routes — most notably the Jobava-Prie London (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bf4, named after Baadur Jobava) and the g3/Bg2 Pseudo-Catalan setups without c4. Neither appears in the list.

And here is the most telling point about the data: not a single metric is supplied. No ACPL, no engine match rate, no game statistics, no win rate. Every technical claim is a vendor claim. I spent three months learning that a beautiful chart is no substitute for a correct process — and here, there is not even a beautiful chart.

The marketing carries a notable internal tension. It calls White's approach "not very ambitious" and the same systems "extremely dangerous." These do not contradict each other in chess terms, but they are easy to misread. The danger is not White's objective advantage; it is drift risk. White gets a risk-free game, and if Black does not know the characteristic plan, Black quietly loses the initiative. That is the danger of drift, not the danger of a worse position.

A buyer who reads "extremely dangerous" and assumes these openings are objectively strong will be mis-calibrated. Read it as sales copy, not a technical report. Its relevance depends on the rating band: defensible below 2,000, weak above 2,200, where concrete knowledge beats general ideas.

As for the author, only two facts are verifiable: the IM title and the Bulgarian trainer label. No current rating, no tournament activity, no results. In the online-course market, an author's title is a positioning signal: IM courses typically target club players, while GM courses target the 2,100-plus segment. On the available evidence, this product sits in the first tier.

The real value of the course is not the Catalan but the London and Trompowsky modules — where plan-based teaching genuinely closes the largest knowledge gap for club players. Buy it expecting a complete anti-1.d4 defence and you will be disappointed: the 2.c4 mainlines sit outside its scope, and the Jobava London may be absent. Buy it for the plan layer, and you may get what you came for.

What is worth watching over the next twelve months is not this course but an entire opening economy: free engines plus AI-assisted content are compressing the price of every plans-based course. The question is no longer who has the most moves, but who has the most correct process for turning moves into plans, and plans into points. Data is a mirror; but only those willing to face themselves see the truth.