The Ninth Move of Patience: A King's Indian DVD and the Price of a Promise

The Ninth Move of Patience: A King's Indian DVD and the Price of a Promise

On my desk in Saint Petersburg, with January snow sealing the window frame, a chess opening DVD had just arrived. The cover showed a familiar position: the black king tucked behind its pawns, both wings breaking open like two rivers running backwards. The leaflet inside carried a single line — an antidote to the Bayonet. I opened the database, checked the theory line by line, and stopped at one cold detail: not a single player named, not a single sample game cited, not a single engine evaluation printed. Only a promise. To a man who has sat in a sports editor's chair for nearly half a century, a promise without data is always the beginning of an inspection, never the end of a belief.

It took me several days to place that promise on the right square of the board.

Context: a branch for the adventurous

The King's Indian Defence is a classic hypermodern system. Black concedes the centre from the start and then strikes back at it: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2 e5 7.0-0 Nc6 8.d5 Ne7. The core idea is that Black accepts being squeezed for space in exchange for a solid pawn structure and counterplay on both wings. The Mar del Plata branch, roughly ECO E97–E99, is the sharpest section of the whole system: Black pushes f5, White launches his queenside pawns, and the two sides race to see who breaks the other's fortress first.

The ninth move 9.b4 — the bayonet thrust that theory calls the Bayonet Attack — is White's modern answer. The b-pawn advances, threatens b5, harasses the knight on c6, and forces Black to decide about his queenside structure before he can even start the f5 attack. For decades, Black's orthodox reply has been 9...Nh5: the knight goes to the rim, opens the position, and pushes White into long, concrete sequences that can be memorised. That is the road of the well-prepared player, of the analysis room, of anyone who believes theory can solve every position on earth.

The DVD on my desk proposed a different road: 9...a5.

Where the promise actually sits

The product presents 9...a5 as a practical remedy against the fashionable Bayonet, and its argument deserves to be taken apart layer by layer.

The technical claim comes first. 9...a5 is not a new move. It is a recognised sideline of Mar del Plata theory, not an invention. The main line remains 9...Nh5; 9...a5 survives because it changes the character of the game, not because it is objectively stronger.

Then comes the practical claim. The marketing says 9...Nh5 opens the position, forces the lines, and makes computer analysis important again, whereas 9...a5 leads to sound positions with very few concrete lines. That is a psychological argument, not a theoretical one. It sells the relief of not having to memorise.

The claim about balance is far thinner. The material asserts that chances are equal. That positional judgement may hold in certain lines, but it arrives with no evidence at all: no win rate, no ACPL figure, no sample games, no database statistics.

The most telling point is how the product picks its audience. It targets people who prefer to think for themselves rather than memorise. That is identity-based selling, very effective with club players, and it says nothing about the real quality of 9...a5.

The counterintuitive angle: the engines already understand, only the copywriter does not

The argument that computers often do not know how to handle these complex strategic positions carries the fingerprint of the pre-AlphaZero era. With today's neural-network engines, the long-term positional battles of the King's Indian are handled far better than that sentence implies. A sales pitch resting on an outdated premise is a pitch past its expiry date.

The bigger risk is theoretical obsolescence. An antidote lasts only until the other side analyses it, and the Bayonet is one of the most heavily studied branches in chess; secrecy does not hold for long. If 9...a5 appears often enough, White's answer will arrive within a single theory cycle.

There is also a problem that belongs not to chess but to sourcing. The headline attached to the original text refers to a team round in Samarkand where the strong teams all won despite close calls, while the entire body underneath is a DVD advertisement. Two unrelated texts were stitched into one shell. For anyone who quotes and reuses information, that is a red flag about data integrity, and it forces the reader back to the primary source before believing anything else.

What the product is really worth

The technical core is real. Mar del Plata is a durable system, and the pain of facing the Bayonet is real too. But the product sells a secondary branch as if it were a solution, with no data to prove it. Its competitive value therefore sits at a modest level.

At the industry layer, this is a signal inside the opening-theory publishing market, where a product competes directly against free databases and engine tools. What keeps such products alive is not the raw lines but the guiding structure written by a human being.

Its reference value is low, because the author is anonymous, there are no games and no competitive results.

What to watch

The clearest signal is the appearance of 9...a5 in top-level classical games. If it turns up in events rated 2700 and above, the DVD's premise is either confirmed or refuted.

Alongside that, the frequency of the Bayonet Attack decides the product's shelf life. If 9.b4 keeps thriving, the DVD still has a reason to exist; if the branch fades, the whole sales argument collapses with it.

On the sourcing side, recovering the original Samarkand report and the DVD listing page would show whether the headline and the body can be reconciled at all.

What remains is the author's identity. A grandmaster with real King's Indian results would turn an anonymous advertisement into assessable content.

When the stadium no longer holds a ball, memory starts scoring. In chess, when the analysis board goes dark, only the theory lines keep talking to each other. On the day my heart stopped, I learned to beat more slowly but more deeply — and that is exactly the promise of 9...a5: slower, deeper, less memorisation. On a Luzhniki night, an old bird understands that landing is also a way of flying. The transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope; the opening-theory market is the same, except here the buyer pays in study hours rather than in millions.

If you are a club player tired of memorising long forced sequences, 9...a5 is a tool worth testing — but check it against a current database and engine before you take it to the board. And if you write about chess, remember that a sideline only becomes a weapon while the opponent has not read it yet. That window is usually shorter than we think.