Six Videos, Seven Openings: Where Black's Preparation Ledger Doesn't Balance

Six videos. Seven openings. One plan per opening.

The 32nd instalment of the ChessBase'26 series, “Tips for Beginners,” is put together by International Master Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. The subject is Black-side preparation: what Black does when White sidesteps main lines after 1.d4. The list names the London System, the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov Opening. Seven names. Six videos.

Any mismatch in a ledger sends my hand to the notebook. In the 2026 Premier Division Chess League signing window I sat on it for 19 days — and counted fourteen guest signings at the end, eleven of the twenty top-board seats in imported hands. Some wanted to call that a scandal. I did not, because the numbers speak for themselves: the standard went up, and board-hours for Dhaka juniors went down. Nineteen days can change a club, and a season's arithmetic too. This course should be read the same way — not as an announcement, but as a ledger.

Context

You cannot grasp Black's problem without grasping why White plays these systems. Write the classical route and after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 there are four big mountains in front of Black: the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen's Gambit Accepted, the Orthodox Queen's Gambit Declined. For a club player these are mountains of memorisation. So he drops 2.c4 and builds a system with 2.Nf3 or 2.Bg5 or 3.e3. The game stops being about remembering lines and becomes about applying a plan.

That gap is the market. But the seven names are not one basket. The Catalan is no sideline at all — 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3, a fixture of world-championship preparation, where long-term queenside pressure has to be weighed against a fianchettoed bishop. The Blackmar-Diemer Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.e4 dxe4 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.f3) is romantic by nature, and widely regarded as insufficient in front of accurate defence at master level. The Trompowsky and Richter-Veresov are born in different move orders, usually after 1...Nf6. The London and the Colle are safe club-level set-ups.

Looking at that list, I get the sense that someone read the opening names off a card outside the room and walked in — without sitting at the table to move the pieces. Put the Catalan and the Colle under one roof and the buyer assumes the labour is equal. It is not. That assumption is his biggest cost.

Core

The first account is on Black's own shoulders. If White picks a safe sideline after 1.d4 d5, White carries no risk — he plays for a small, pressure-free edge. The accuracy burden then belongs to Black: he must equalise, and he must equalise without drifting into a passive structure. Anyone who reads “White is not ambitious” as “Black is comfortable” has made the most expensive misreading on the page. The product sells the harder half of the equation without saying that it is the harder half.

Second is the labour account. Colle, Torre, Blackmar-Diemer, Richter-Veresov — those four are nearly static year after year. But the London and the Catalan belong in separate rooms, not in the same video. The Catalan is a mainline with enormous forced-line theory, and today's London is a mountain of its own: Jobava-style branches, ...c5/...Qb6 set-ups, ...e6/...Bd6 structures, even transpositions into the Slav and Caro-Kann complexes. Six videos for seven systems means either two systems share one slot or one gets skipped. A single plan video can give a club player a scaffold for the London or the Catalan; it cannot give a durable answer at 2026+ level.

Third is the shelf-life account. Not every segment of one course ages at the same rate — the London section will date quickly, the Colle, Torre and gambit sections will last for years. A product that presents itself as uniform has two different life spans inside it. A buyer would do better to scrutinise the London segment specifically and absorb the rest slowly.

Fourth is the market account. Almost everything named in that promotional page exists free online — streamer videos, platform courses, YouTube lectures. Nobody here is buying secret information; they are buying order, curation and production. That is the present frontier of the paid-content market: not information, but structure.

Fifth is the format account, and it is the least discussed. Teaching through “plans” actually survives time well, because plans age slowly and lines age fast. For exactly that reason the 32nd instalment of a serial is not a flagship course but a subscription-retention layer. The series rests on the ground, not on one instalment.

Reading this instalment, the Dhaka line in my own notebook opened again. The notebook says one thing; the tape says another. In March 2026, at the hall in Purana Paltan, the Premier Division League stopped at round three — it did not end. Eighteen months of darkness followed. And it was in that period that our club players met these systems every second game online, because the London and the Trompowsky appear far more often in online rapid than in elite over-the-board chess. Keeping over-the-board and online ratings in separate ledgers is an old habit of mine, and it matters here: mix them and the conclusion comes out wrong. The structural backdrop has to be remembered too. In 2026 this country produced South Asia's first grandmaster, a year before India did; the balance now reads five against eighty-plus. The school tournament that ran from 2026 to 2026 has stopped, the federation's annual government grant sits near Tk 11 lakh, and between 2026 and 2026 not a single grandmaster norm tournament was held at home. When a paid serial arrives on that soil, the question is not whether the course is good. The question is who assembles a starter course for a training market that has no coaching pipeline to assemble it.

Counter-evidence sits in the notebook too, and the piece is incomplete without it. On 5 July 2026, Grandmaster Ziaur Rahman — fifteen-time national champion, holder of the country's highest rating of 2570, a man who needed chess for bread and butter — suffered a heart attack at the board and died. Five months later, at fourteen, Manon Reja Neer won the national title undefeated. The following year, at 59, Niaz Murshed took his seventh national title, thirty-eight years after becoming South Asia's first grandmaster. At 82, Rani Hamid still wins Olympiad games. Keep those three entries together and you see that a thirty-year crisis can still keep living people inside it.

Contrarian

The received reading is easy: seven openings in six videos, therefore shallow, therefore skip it. The error is not there. The format is sound; the fault is in the promotional language. The natural job of “plan” teaching is to give direction, not to drill lines — a concept-level course survives a meta shift, a database-based repertoire does not. A buyer who reads this format as a swindle is actually buying something that was never announced: a complete Black repertoire.

Second, free substitutes do not make a paid course worthless; they change what is being priced. If a buyer thinks the price is for information, he is buying the wrong thing. Sequence, curation, and the discipline of having errors pointed out — that is the merchandise.

Third, this series carries an odd feedback loop nobody counts. The more Black-side preparation content is published, the more willing Black is to answer 1.d4 with 1...d5; the more willing Black is, the more often White reaches for a sideline — so the product manufactures part of its own demand. This niche is self-feeding, not saturating.

And the final error is the costliest: reading “White is not ambitious” as Black sitting in comfort. Black is not comfortable. Black is paying, move by move.

Takeaway

What to watch in the coming months: whether the London's share is genuinely rising in elite classical events, and whether new Black set-ups keep entering the repertoire market. The signal worth tracking at the series level is the author roster — if GM authors begin to rotate in, or difficulty bands appear, the publisher has read the criticism. Part 32 of a serial is a stopgap, not a milestone. And for a country that arrived first in 2026 and then waited seventeen years for its next new grandmaster, the honest question is what it will do with six more videos: how much of the road to 2300 is a plan, and how much of it is a coach?