The Black Side's Royal Road: Six Videos, Seven Systems, and a Catalan-Shaped Gap

In the course's promotional page, opening names appear in two places: four systems at the top — Colle, Trompowsky, Torre, London — and three more at the bottom: Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer, Richter-Veresov. Seven systems, six videos. I circled those two lines before reading anything else, because of a professional habit: I trust footage more than testimony, because footage cannot lie. A table of contents is also a kind of footage. It records what the seller wants you to see, and what they did not have room to hide.

The seller here is an opening video course by IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. The subject: building a position for Black against the family of openings where White plays 1.d4 but deliberately avoids 2.c4 — what the chess world calls anti-Queen's Gambit systems. The more telling detail lies elsewhere. The original headline is almost certainly a botched translation of the German idiom "der richtige Königsweg" — the right royal road. A garbled translated headline is usually the trace of a reposted article, not a reported one. And when the source is a repost, every fact inside it is a vendor claim.

The market is clear. For two decades club chess has drifted toward low-memorisation systems: London, Colle, Torre. Amateur players learned they could enter the game with a tidy setup, few lines, few theoretical traps, and save their energy for the middlegame. Black, without a matching answer, simply gets pushed into a passive position without understanding why. That is a real pain point, and this course aims straight at it: one video, one Black plan, one White system.

Seven systems, six videos. The arithmetic itself reveals how depth was allocated: at least one video must carry two systems, or one system was compressed. On the list, the most theoretically demanding system is the Catalan — and that is almost certainly where the compression happened.

The reason is taxonomic. The Catalan is not an avoidance system. It is 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2, meaning White still plays 2.c4, still steps into exactly the theory-dense territory the copy says White is fleeing. Filing the Catalan alongside the Colle and the London mixes two categories: on one side a mainline opening with a complex family tree (ECO E00–E09), on the other lightweight setups built on plans. One sixth of the runtime cannot carry the Catalan. The Catalan module should be read as orientation, not preparation.

The Trompowsky has a move-order problem too. The Trompowsky proper is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5, arising before Black commits to ...d5. If the course is framed around 1...d5 first, what you get is a different, loosely named branch. To a club player the difference sounds small; to anyone building a serious repertoire it is an unexplained move-order decision. And the Blackmar-Diemer (1.d4 d5 2.e4) is a romantic gambit, not a quiet system — placing it beside the Colle and the London mixes strategic styles.

Memory cost across the six videos is wildly uneven. Colle, Torre and Blackmar-Diemer can be handled by plans plus a few 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, ...b6. Four different difficulty bands inside one flat-priced product means the buyer is really paying for one strong module — the plans against the London and the Trompowsky — plus several thin ones.

The contents page exposes another gap. The "1...d5 plus plans" frame omits systems that reach the same structures by another route. Most notably the Jobava-Prie London (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bf4), one of the most popular systems at both club and grandmaster level today, and the g3/Bg2 "pseudo-Catalan" setups without c4. Neither appears in the promotional text. Whether they are taught inside the videos the text does not say — and that silence is itself a statement about editorial standards.

On the author, only two verifiable facts exist: the IM title and the description "Bulgarian trainer." No rating, no activity dates, no sample games. In the online course market, an author's title functions as a positioning signal: IM-authored courses usually target club and improving players, while repertoires written by grandmasters and tested at 2600-plus target the 2100+ bracket. There is no ACPL, no engine-match percentage, no game statistics. Every claim about the product's technical quality is unverifiable from the source.

The sharpest tension sits inside the copy itself. One line calls White's approach "not very ambitious." Another calls these systems "extremely dangerous." The two do not contradict each other in chess terms: the danger here is not an objective White advantage, it is drift risk. White gets a riskless game; Black without the characteristic plan drifts, and drifting loses. A buyer who reads "extremely dangerous" as "objectively strong" will mis-calibrate their entire expectation.

In Vietnam that gap is visible. Elite players such as Le Quang Liem or Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son hardly ever use the London or the Colle as a main weapon — at that level you live on mainline theory. But in amateur events, in clubs, in school chess, the London and the Colle appear everywhere. Based on my own experience watching games at junior tournaments, most Black players lose for lack of a plan, not for lack of lines. I once sat recording games at a junior event in Hai Phong and saw the same script repeat: White builds Bf4, e3, Bd3, Nbd2 and pushes e4; Black plays the right moves with the wrong plan.

The counter-argument sits here. Throughout this piece I have measured the product with a data yardstick, and that yardstick must be applied to my own judgment too. I have no data showing this course does not work. No satisfaction rate, no learner sample, no before-and-after tournament results. All I have is a table of contents and a promotional page. A table of contents is not enough to convict a product, and not enough to certify it either.

If forced to name the biggest worry, I would not name course quality. I would name what the course is a symptom of: the opening economy. A course that teaches plans is useful. But an entire market of opening courses teaching amateur players to spend their study time memorising repertoires instead of tactics and endgames is a different story. At club level, most games are decided after move 25, not on move 8. I have run hurdles all my life without ever being timed — and I know the feeling of preparing the start meticulously and running out of breath on the home straight.

I rewind the SEA Games 29 footage to find what people left behind; with an opening course, what gets left behind usually sits right on the runtime line. Every documentary is a track: the audience sees the finish, I live at every starting line. Course buyers are the same. They see the promise of never losing to the London again. What they actually receive sits across six very different starting lines — and on one of them, the race is longer than the rest combined. Before clicking buy, try one simple thing: set up the board, place White in the Catalan, and ask yourself whether you have the time for it.