An Opening DVD Sells 9...a5 Against the Bayonet: No Games, No Data, No Author

Delhi, 11 p.m. I opened the promotional file with the coffee already cold, and the first line hit me: “Samarkand R2 (open): Despite close calls, all top teams grab wins.” Below that line, the entire body of the text is about a DVD teaching the move 9...a5 against the Bayonet Attack in the King's Indian Defense. The headline tells a story about a team event in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The body sells an opening product. Two unrelated texts, spliced into a single package and pushed online.

I sat still for thirty seconds, then set the headline aside and read the body. The body is what matters: someone is selling 9...a5 as an antidote to the Bayonet Attack, and there is not a single game, a single line of data, or a single name behind that claim.

The question I asked didn't sound like a woman's question, but the answer they dodged didn't sound like a man's answer either.

A side line sold as a main line

The King's Indian Defense begins with 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6, with Black conceding the centre from move two and then striking back at it. The Mar del Plata branch — named after a tournament held in Argentina in 2026 — is the sharpest version of the system: Black develops the knight to c6, pushes the e5 pawn, White locks the centre with d4-d5, and both sides race at each other on opposite wings. Opening references place the branch roughly between ECO E97 and E99.

The Bayonet Attack is White's answer 9.b4: a queenside pawn thrust that grabs space, threatens to open lines for the rook, and disrupts Black's setup. Black has one main reply played at every level, 9...Nh5, dropping the knight to the rim to open the position and force both sides into concrete calculation. That move has been dissected to the bone across thousands of games and every public database.

The DVD I was reading about proposes a different move: 9...a5. This is a known, secondary branch, not an invention. It pushes the queenside pawn against White's b4 pawn and steers the game into a closed, maneuvering struggle with few forced lines. The seller does not hide that. He is selling exactly that.

The promise and the data gap

The product's argument fits into one sentence: 9...Nh5 opens the position, forces concrete lines, and makes computer analysis important again; 9...a5 leads to sound positions with very few concrete lines. In other words, the buyer is not buying a stronger move. The buyer is buying a change in the character of the game: from a memory contest to a positional contest.

The claim that “chances are equal” in the promotional text is a positional assessment, not a claim of theoretical superiority. That is entirely legitimate. The problem lies elsewhere: the product offers not a single metric to verify its own promise. No win rate, no draw rate, no engine match rate, no sample game cited, no author named.

I read the promotional text three times looking for one line of numbers. There was none. With an opening product, missing data means the buyer has to trust the seller's reputation. But the seller's reputation is not stated either. We are being asked to trust an anonymous person, talking about an opening branch, with no supporting evidence.

The engine trap that is two generations old

The part that irritates me most is the human-versus-machine framing. The promotional text says, in substance, that computers often do not know how to handle these complex strategic positions. That sentence was once true. It was true in the era when engines judged positions by material count and search depth, before the neural-network generation of engines arrived.

Today, neural-network engines handle the long-term strategic positions of the King's Indian Defense far better than that sentence implies. A move like 9...a5 no longer sits outside a machine's understanding. The fact that the promotional text still uses the computers-don't-understand argument marks it as old marketing copy, written in a period that has passed and then re-labelled as new.

This matters to the buyer. If you buy because you believe you are holding territory that machines cannot scan, you are buying an illusion. That territory was scanned long ago.

A sourcing error more worrying than 9...a5 itself

Back to the headline. A piece of writing whose headline is about a team event in Samarkand while its body is about an opening DVD is a sourcing error. That error does not make 9...a5 wrong or right. It does something else: it tells you the workflow that produced that text has a problem.

To me, this is the most alarming detail in the whole package. If an operation cannot check its own headline against its own body, what is the probability it checked the quality of an opening line? If you are a reader, a coach, or a specialist writer citing this material, you are citing a source that does not agree with itself.

I once mispronounced a player's name, and then got the game right when the replay rolled slowly in front of my eyes. The lesson from 2026 repeats: the first error always lies in verification, not in judgement.

Who actually buys this

The product targets a very specific group of learners. The promotional text says it plainly: for players who like to think for themselves, not for memorizers. This is identity-based marketing, not technical marketing. It sells the player a feeling of belonging to a smarter group.

And it is not entirely baseless. Based on my experience watching games at open tournaments in India and Asia, most players below international master level lose because they do not understand positions, not because they lack lines. A product that teaches them to play slowly, keep structure, and endure closed positions has real value. That value lies in the method, not in the move 9...a5.

At the top level, the story is completely different. Teimour Radjabov has stayed loyal to the King's Indian Defense across decades at the elite level; Garry Kasparov chose the system in some of the most important games of his career. But both played it inside a system analysed move by move, against opponents also prepared move by move. Neither of them bought a side line and believed that settled the matter.

Where the risk actually sits

The biggest risk of the 9...a5 line is not that it is bad. The risk is that it is famous. Once an opening branch enters the public database, it leaves the seller's hands. White can study it independently, and opening history shows that every antidote breeds an antidote to the antidote within one theoretical cycle.

The promotional text promises that if Black knows what to do, things quickly become dangerous for White. This is a directional claim that cannot be verified from the text. It depends entirely on how well White has prepared, something nobody can measure before the game is played.

Mistakes are not frightening; bending down to pick up the footage again at 2 a.m. is what makes a forecaster. A DVD buyer rarely has those two free hours. That is why most opening products sell the feeling of safety rather than safety itself.

Where I might be wrong

I might be wrong here, and I will say so plainly.

I once bought a similar opening product back in 2026, when I was still a chess player and tournament organiser. It did not win me a single game through the opening. It helped me understand why I was losing. For a product like that, that is real value, and I have to admit it before I criticise it.

Second, the computers-don't-understand argument may be a technical error but it is also a marketing asset. Buyers do not want to buy another program; they want to buy a way out of programs. If the seller understands that psychology and still delivers the method, the exaggeration is only packaging.

Third, I have not played the 9...a5 line at a high enough level for long enough to claim it has no practical value. I am only saying that value has not been demonstrated in any document I have read.

Ten years standing in the middle of arguments, and the fire lit by a question in 2026 still burns. My question is unchanged, only the target is different: does anyone actually play 9...a5, or is there only a seller?

What to watch

I am not predicting whether this product succeeds or fails. I am predicting something verifiable: over the next eighteen months, watch classical-game databases at the 2700 level and above. If 9...a5 appears regularly in top events, the promotional text is right about the practical side. If it stays silent as it has for a decade, this product is an educational item wrapped in the form of an antidote.

In parallel, look for the original Samarkand report. If a real team event in Uzbekistan with real results exists, it deserves its own write-up, with its own data, rather than sitting inside a promotional file.

Silent applause can kill emotion, but it cannot kill tactics. A wrong headline spliced onto a right body cannot kill tactics either. It only forces the reader to go and check for themselves. And perhaps that is the best outcome this package accidentally produced.