9...a5 and the Price of an Opening Promise Without Data

Da Nang, a June evening, the rainy season arriving. I open the catalogue of a familiar chess publisher, and among hundreds of titles, one product catches my eye: an "antidote" to the Bayonet Attack — the move 9.b4 — the weapon young players are bringing to the board so often that loyalists of the King's Indian Defense are losing sleep. The seller promises a repertoire of "few concrete lines, much strategy," aimed at those who "want to think for themselves instead of memorizing." At 55, I have heard too many such promises to stop at the advertising copy.

This season, the chess market has none of the noise of blockbuster transfers. But it has something louder: theoretical promises packaged like consumer goods, labelled, priced, and pushed onto shelves. And I — a man who has spent thirty-nine years reading scoreboards — have learned one thing: sometimes you must read what is not on the scoreboard. The stands are empty, but the podcast taught me to listen to the game from the inside. This time, what I hear is the sound of a move being sold.

The King's Indian Defense is one of the strangest systems in modern chess. Black concedes the centre from the start — 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6, then ...Bg7 — and then comes back to claim it with ...Nc6 and ...e5. This is pure hypermodern thinking: let the opponent take space, then turn that space into a target. The Mar del Plata variation is the sharpest branch of the system. The two sides attack on opposite wings: White pushes queenside pawns, Black pushes kingside pawns, and the result is often decided by who arrives one tempo sooner. By ECO classification, the branch falls between E97 and E99.

For decades, this was the weapon of the stubborn. But elite chess changes. Around the 2010s, top White players began favouring a different approach: 9.b4, known as the Bayonet Attack. Instead of waiting, White pushes the queenside pawn forward, grabs space, and forces Black to answer a concrete question immediately. There is no room left for strategic vagueness — White wants to pose the problem, and to pose it now.

The orthodox reply, played most often at every level, is 9...Nh5. The knight jumps to the rim, frees the pieces, forces the position open, and turns the game into a calculation race. Whoever remembers more, whoever analyses deeper, wins. That is why this branch has become the nightmare of Black players who have no time.

The DVD in question proposes a different choice: 9...a5. On paper, this is not an invention. 9...a5 is a sideline known for a long time, in which Black attacks the b4-pawn at once, forces White to define the pawn structure, and steers the game toward a long strategic struggle rather than a forcing race. What is remarkable is not the move, but the way it is sold.

The seller builds the entire argument on a simple yet effective opposition. After 9...Nh5, "the position opens up, the lines are forced, and computer analysis becomes important again." After 9...a5, "the position is sound with very few concrete lines." Placed side by side, these two sentences are a declaration about the nature of modern chess, reaching beyond the scope of a single opening move.

Let us separate it. 9...Nh5 is the path of the memorizer. You need to know the forced sequences, you need to recall the twenty-fifth move, you need an analysis tool strong enough to keep pace with your opponent move by move. That is a harsh life, in which you are always chasing someone who has read a newer book.

9...a5 is the path of the thinker. You do not need to remember much; you only need to understand the position — to understand that your opponent's b4-pawn is a target, that the queenside may become a battlefield, that the pawn structure will decide who holds the worse pawn in the endgame. You let your opponent wrestle with unclear choices, and you trust your own judgement more than another person's memory.

This is a clever marketing argument, because it aims squarely at a specific market segment: club players, IM-level players, those weary of being crushed by an opponent who bought a newer book. It does not promise a theoretical edge. It promises autonomy.

And it is honest in one praiseworthy respect: it admits that 9...a5 leads only to equality, not to an advantage. "Chances are equal" — that is a positional claim, not a claim of novelty. In a market where everyone promises a "decisive edge," admitting equality is a small plus.

But that very honesty highlights what is missing. If the product promises only equality, it must demonstrate that this equality is reached more easily than via the orthodox path. And to demonstrate that, you need data. Here, the data does not exist.

There are three gaps in this package that a buyer should see before paying.

First, there is not a single number. No win rate, no ACPL figure — average centipawn loss versus the engine's best move — no sample game, no database cited. An opening-course product that offers no evidence of practical effectiveness is a product selling belief. Based on my experience following games, I always check a new move by seeing how often it appears in top-level games and how many of those it wins. Here, there is nothing to check.

Second, and more seriously, is the claim that "computers often do not know how to handle these complex strategic positions." This is the language of a bygone era. Before neural-network engines such as AlphaZero appeared, classical engines genuinely struggled with long-term King's Indian positions, where the advantage is measured not in material but in structure. But that era is over. Today's engines evaluate these positions better than most humans, and they are no longer "confused" as the advertising suggests. The sentence sounds more like an anti-computer argument than a technical fact.

Third, and this is what made me pause longest: the original document's title describes a team round in Samarkand, Uzbekistan — "R2 (open): despite close calls, all top teams grab wins." Yet the entire body discusses this opening DVD. Two unrelated texts have been spliced together. For a journalist, this is a red flag about source quality: if the headline and the content do not match, then the promises inside deserve similar scepticism.

And here is the crux many overlook: the real value of an "antidote" lies not in the move, but in whether the opponent is prepared. 9...a5 is a known sideline. A well-prepared White player can still find play. This product may help club and IM players score a few surprise points against opponents who have never met it. It is unlikely to change matters at grandmaster level.

People talk about speed, but I find time. In the world of openings, what is sold is not the fastest move, but the time you save by not having to memorize. That is a real commodity; it is just that its price is not clearly stated.

At this age, I understand that a polymath is not someone who knows many disconnected things, but someone who finds the thread that joins them. An opening move, a track race, a podcast episode from empty stands — all answer the same question: what is real, and what is merely a carefully packaged promise.

I once spent a fifteen-minute video series analysing every lap of a female track athlete, and what I learned was not technique. It was this: people only believe when they can see the mechanism. A stride, a breath, a foot placed in the wrong spot — that is evidence.

In chess, the evidence is games. Not promises about the "soundness" of a position, but real games, played by real people, in real tournaments. When a publisher hands you a move without a single game attached, they are handing you an advertisement, not a lesson. And if you are a club player trying to escape the nightmare named the Bayonet Attack, 9...a5 is worth opening — but open it with the eyes of a shopper, not of a worshipper.

What deserves trust is not the move. It is the game that proves it.