Seven Openings, Six Videos: The Catalan Gap in a Black Repertoire Course

Der richtige Königsweg — literally, the right royal road. When the German phrase passed through a machine-translation layer and reached me inside a product introduction, it collapsed into "the right king road", sounding like a riddle from a beginner's English class. I read it on a Wednesday evening, in a chess club two streets from Hongkou station, where four boards were running and three of them opened with the London System. Nobody there needed a lecture on 2.c4.

What they need — and what that article is selling — is an answer to a very specific question: once White has finished setting up the pieces, what does Black actually do next?

The product is a six-part video course by IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. The introduction says it covers seven systems White uses to sidestep mainline theory after 1.d4: the Colle System (D04–D05), the Trompowsky (A45), the Torre (D03/A46), the London System (D02), the Catalan (E00–E09), the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit (D00) and the Richter-Veresov (D01). Each video is said to "demonstrate a relevant plan for Black" against one opening. That is plans-based teaching, not lines-based teaching — a legitimate pedagogical choice for club players who do not have three hundred hours to memorise moves.

But the frame has a crack running through it. The copy calls White's approach "not very ambitious" and, in the same breath, calls these seven systems "extremely dangerous". In chess those two statements do not contradict each other, and the correct reading is this: the danger is not that Black is worse, it is that Black drifts — losing the initiative because he does not know what to do, while White accumulates a little at a time without taking any risk. This is drift risk, not objective-evaluation risk. A buyer who reads "extremely dangerous" as a verdict on the strength of these openings will calibrate his expectations wrongly.

Then comes the taxonomy. It is the biggest technical finding when you hold the list of seven systems against the article's own premise. The premise is "after 1.d4 d5". The Catalan does not live in that frame. The Catalan is 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2; White must play 2.c4, the very move the article says White is trying to avoid. In other words, the Catalan is the most theory-dense mainline on the list, sitting inside exactly the theoretical category the product claims to stand outside. One video out of six cannot carry it. If I have to name the thinnest point of the course, I name the Catalan.

Move order exposes the same problem. The Trompowsky proper is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5, which arrives before Black commits to ...d5. Push ...d5 on move one and the game goes into a different line, with a different name. The "after 1.d4 d5" umbrella hides a real move-order decision. It also hides the fact that the Blackmar-Diemer is a romantic gambit, not a quiet system, bundled alongside the Colle and the London. My most romantic mistake is believing that chess pieces can write poetry — and I still enjoy seeing it on the list, even knowing it is a classification error.

The next gap is one any club player holding Black will spot. The Jobava-Prie London — named after Baadur Jobava — that is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bf4, is one of the most popular anti-establishment systems in modern chess, from club level to the elite circuit. It does not appear. Neither do the g3/Bg2 "Pseudo-Catalan" setups without c4. For a course that presents itself as the answer to theory-avoiding systems, that absence matters — especially because it may reflect the age of the original recording rather than an editorial decision.

The difficulty gradient across the six videos is anything but even. The Colle, the Torre and the Blackmar-Diemer can be handled with plans plus a dozen concrete moves. The Trompowsky and the London demand accuracy against early ...c5, ...Ne4 and ...h6 ideas and against the dark-squared bishop trade. The Catalan demands an actual repertoire decision: the Open Catalan with ...dxc4, ...b5 and ...Bb4+, or closed structures with ...Nbd7, ...c6 and ...b6. Seven systems packed into six videos, with one system several times heavier in theory than the rest, means the buyer is paying for one strong module and a few thin ones.

And here is the most telling technical point: no ACPL figure, no engine match rate, no sample games, no scoring statistics. There is no data at all with which to verify technical quality. For an opening product that is a gap one line of metadata could close; that it was not closed is itself a signal.

On the author, the only verifiable items are the letters IM and the words "Bulgarian trainer". No rating, no tournament record, no recent over-the-board activity. In the online course market, an author's title works as a positioning signal: IM-authored courses usually target club players, while GM-authored or 2600-tested repertoires are marketed at the 2100-plus segment. On the available evidence, this product sits in the first tier.

Setting the marketing aside, the product has real value, and it is not in the Catalan. It is in the London and Trompowsky videos — the two systems where most club players lose not because they lack moves, but because they lack a plan. A video teaching "where to put the knight once Bf4 is in place" can save more half-points than a pile of engine lines. But it should be said plainly: "extremely dangerous" is a sales device tuned to the very real pain of the player who keeps losing to the London System, not an engine-derived evaluation.

Commercially, the product sits in the long tail of the opening-content market: below GM-authored lifetime repertoires, above free YouTube and database material. The introduction names no publisher, no price, no runtime and no release date. A decent editorial review would state all four. Their absence is a signal about the editorial standards around the product — and it is why I cannot say whether this is new material or an older recording re-promoted.

That leads to the buyer's biggest risk, and the risk lies in expectation, not in content quality. The "extremely dangerous" frame invites buyers to over-value these sidelines relative to the 2.c4 mainlines. The second risk is structural: seven systems, six videos, one system demanding more theory than the other six combined. The third is shelf life — with no date, nobody knows how many years old the Trompowsky and London lines inside it already are.

One detail is easily missed: this course is not a complete Black repertoire against 1.d4. The major 2.c4 mainlines — Queen's Gambit Declined, Slav, Semi-Slav — sit outside its scope by design. The buyer needs another source for that part. Nothing wrong with that; it just needs to be said clearly, and the introduction does not say it.

I still keep the habit of dropping into youth chess classes every Wednesday, noting how the children place pieces rather than counting their results. That is where I learned that a good plan taught well can change a whole game, while a good opening line half-remembered only manufactures false confidence.

And there is something bigger than this product. Based on my own experience following matches and clubs, club chess has spent the past decade drifting toward low-theory systems, and instructional content has followed that shift rather than created it. The opening economy — where IM-level writers sell plans against club-level openings — lives off that demand. The clatter of a learner's keyboard is also a heartbeat of the modern chess world. But supply is thickening: free opening databases, free engines, and now AI-assisted course generation. The only defensible edge left is pedagogy and plans actually tested at the board.

After three decades of writing, I have realised I never wrote about sport. I wrote about people trying to remember a move, and about the moment they realise they have forgotten it.

The list of seven systems in that article remains useful, independent of the product. It is a checklist: if you play Black, do you have an answer to the Colle, the Trompowsky, the Torre, the London, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer and the Richter-Veresov? The market gap lies elsewhere — a complete anti-1.d4 repertoire, engine-verified, covering both the sideroads and the 2.c4 mainlines, updated for the chess world of the next two years. Whoever builds that before the market is flattened by automatically generated content keeps the door open.