The Theory Tax and Six Opening Videos from an International Master

Winter in Saint Petersburg lasts so long that people forget summer ever existed. In a small chess club on Zhukovsky Street, I watched a man of about seventy push his pawn to d4 and quietly place his knight on f3. He did not play c4. He had never played c4. In front of him lay the London System — a tidy, discreet setup, like a small apartment with the curtains drawn. He told me, his voice as steady as a radiator: "I don't have time to learn the Slav. I just want to play chess."

I have heard that sentence many times over nearly fifty years of watching the chess world. It is not a complaint. It is a statement about economics. Club-level players are paying a tax nobody names: the theory tax. Every time they want to enter the most prestigious path of modern chess — 1.d4 followed by 2.c4 — they must buy passage with the memory of hundreds of variations: the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen's Gambit Accepted, the Orthodox Queen's Gambit Declined. The price is measured in thousands of hours of study. Most players cannot pay it, so they turn to side roads: London, Colle, Torre. Unglamorous, but safe.

That is the context for an article I read not long ago, titled "An interview with Timur Turlov." I clicked out of curiosity. Turlov is a name tied to certain chess-sponsorship activities, and figures like him rarely appear as the central subject of specialist chess press. But by the final line I could not find Mr. Turlov anywhere. The content was an introduction to a six-video course by International Master Valeri Lilov of Bulgaria, teaching Black how to meet the "non-critical" d4 systems: the London System, the Colle System, the Torre Attack, the Trompowsky Attack, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov Opening.

The name in the headline and the content of the body do not belong to each other. That was the first detail I recorded, even before weighing the quality of the chess inside.

I sat with that inconsistency. In editing, there is a sign that beginners overlook and veterans catch at once: when the headline speaks of a person and the body speaks of a product, what is being sold is not information — it is attention. The transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope, and the opening-course market runs on exactly that logic. It sells a future in which Black no longer fears d4.

But before judging, I must talk about the chess.

Lilov is not a meaningless name. International Master is the second-highest lifetime title in the FIDE ladder, below only Grandmaster. A holder of that title is a credible expert — but not one at the top of the pyramid. It must be said plainly: the article provides no Elo rating for Lilov, no game, no coaching record. I have watched chess for a long time, and I learned that the credibility of a teacher lies not in the title but in the games they have played and the students they have guided. A title opens the door. Data keeps people in the room.

A six-video model covering more than seven openings is itself a statement about depth. Six sessions, eight systems. I have worked with magazines and with opening coaches. A serious Black repertoire against the London alone could consume a dozen lectures if one wanted to go to the end of the theory. Here, the structure suggests another approach: one plan per opening, a compact map. For club players, that is sometimes worth more than a pile of scattered variations.

Learning an opening is not learning moves; it is learning to recognize four or five typical middlegame structures. The London System leads to different pawn formations; the Colle System revolves around pushing c3 and then e4; the Torre Attack is tied to a bishop on g5 probing the knight on f6; the Trompowsky forces Black to choose as early as move two. A good coach teaches plans. A good salesman teaches variations. Plans endure. Variations expire with every engine update.

Yet there is a notable taxonomic error, and I raise it because it is the fingerprint of a product packaged quickly.

The article frames the entire content as arising "after 1.d4 d5." If that were true, the Trompowsky (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5) and the Torre (1.d4 Nf6 … 3.Bg5) could not appear in that story — both systems run through Nf6, not through d5. And the Catalan contains 2.c4 itself, the very path said to be avoided. Three openings on the list collide with the very frame the article builds to explain them. This is no small writer's slip. It is a sign that the opening taxonomy here serves promotion, not theoretical accuracy.

I want to stop at a few bare numbers: a six-video course, more than seven openings, one International Master, and a name in the headline that does not appear in the body. No more, no less. That is all we actually know. The rest is inference, and I want to be transparent about where I am inferring.

Here I disagree with how the article frames its own subject.

It calls the system-player group "not very ambitious." The phrase, whether careless or deliberate, carries a hint of contempt. Look closely, and they are not short of ambition — they simply buy a different kind of insurance. The London System is not a surrender to theory. It is a rational choice in an economy of time. Club players have a fixed number of hours each week and hundreds of theoretical forks to spend them on. Skipping 2.c4 is a financial decision, not a moral failure.

Moreover, that so-called "safety" is precisely what creates demand for this course. System players open a gap on the board, and the course market instantly inserts a product into it. When tens of thousands of people avoid the main roads together, preparing Black against them becomes a stable market. Lilov is not riding a new wave. He is selling umbrellas for a rain that has lasted decades.

The coaching trade lives on that tax. Most coaches do not teach at the top — they teach at the bottom, where the crowds are. They sell confidence to people who have just lost a game to a forgotten variation. This market is hungry, stable and nearly saturated. Among thousands of free courses online, the value of a paid one lies in curation: telling the learner what to leave out.

Perhaps readers expected a conversation with an influential figure in chess — about sponsorship, about business, about the future of the game in Russia and Eastern Europe. Instead they received a product page. The gap between expectation and content is where disappointment begins. For someone in publishing like me, that is not the product's fault — it is the editor's.

I remember telling a young colleague that the best chess writing always talks about time more than about pieces. People think they are learning an opening; in truth they are learning to allocate memory. A course like this, honestly made, is an estimate of the price of memory. Made carelessly, it is one more ticket selling the same old thirst.

From my experience following club tournaments across many seasons in Russia, I have drawn a simple filter for any chess advertisement: find the author's name, find the Elo rating, find a sample game. If all three are missing, treat the content as an invitation, not as evidence. With this course, we have the author's name, but the other two are missing.

Then there is a silence worth pausing for.

That night, after finishing the article, I turned off the screen and looked out the window. The snow came late this year. I thought about the London System player out there, about the man of seventy on Zhukovsky Street, about the fact that an entire chess culture is drifting away from orthodox theory. When the stadium holds no ball, memory begins to score. When the board holds no main roads, a player's memory begins to replay old games — safe games, games won by plan rather than by living variations.

The day the heart stopped beating, I learned to beat slower but deeper. Club chess is the same. It is slower, shallower in theory, but it still beats. And that slower beat is what feeds thousands of chess teachers.

There is a question I have not answered, and I leave it to the reader. If the name in the headline does not appear in the body, then whose name is it — the interviewee's, the sponsor's, or the algorithm's? I have no evidence to conclude. But after nearly half a century in editing, I know that a misplaced name is never harmless. It is the trace of a process, and that process deserves scrutiny.

I did not write this to say whether those six videos are good or bad. I wrote to remind one thing: look at the name in the headline, then look at the person in the body. If they differ, read more slowly. In a market where theory is packaged, wholesaled and recycled, our ear must tell the coach's voice from the salesman's. I believe the next generation of players will not only ask "is this opening strong" but "what does this opening teach me about my own time." By then the theory tax will not vanish — but it will become a conscious investment, instead of an invisible debt.