The Royal Road and the Gap Named Catalan

THE ROYAL ROAD AND THE GAP NAMED CATALAN

Winter in Saint Petersburg. Thin snow on the windows of a chess club quietly occupying the second floor of an old building. I sat there, tea cooling in my hand, watching two middle-aged men bent over a board. One played the London System — the setup I still call, in my own head, the safe house of those who dread theoretical confrontation. The other was a locally respected player, handling Black, and I could see the confusion in his eyes as White's pieces drifted calmly toward his king. After the game he sighed: "I know it isn't dangerous in theory. But I don't know what to do."

That sentence stuck with me for weeks. It reminded me of a German phrase I once saw in a promotional document sent to our newsroom: der richtige Königsweg — the right royal road. The translator rendered it awkwardly, and I smiled. In chess, no royal road exists that shortens everything. Yet people keep selling it, and people keep buying. Hidden beneath that title is a six-part instructional video product by Bulgarian International Master Valeri Lilov, marketed as the answer for Black against seven opening systems arising after White's first move 1.d4.

Context: a market built on the fear of losing the initiative

The game I witnessed that night was no exception. Since the wave of The Queen's Gambit and the boom of online chess platforms, a new class of club player has emerged. They have no time to memorise the dense theoretical branches of the Queen's Gambit Declined, and they reach instead for low-memorisation systems: the London System, the Colle, the Torre Attack, the Trompowsky.

For Black, facing this, a strange psychological state sets in. Nobody genuinely believes these systems grant White an objective advantage. Players simply do not know what to do next. That gap is exactly what the chess-education market rushes to fill. Lilov's product sits within that current. According to the promotional text, he devotes six videos to presenting "a relevant plan for Black for each single opening" — Colle, Trompowsky, Torre, London, Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, and Richter-Veresov.

Strategically, this is a plans-based product, not a lines-based one. Within opening-curriculum taxonomy, that is a legitimate, even superior pedagogical choice for players below 2026 Elo. Buyers are not promised a novel move absent from the database, no engine-verified sample, no win-draw-loss statistics. They are promised an understanding of where the pieces go once the opening ends. That is a different, smaller, and far more honest promise than the headline it wears.

Core insight: seven systems, six videos, and a title that does not match the contents

The first thing I check in any chess advertisement is the arithmetic. Numbers never lie, even when people try to lie with numbers. The document lists four systems at the beginning and three more at the end. That is seven. The video count is six. In a product sold by episode count, this mismatch is not a formatting error. It is a signal that at least one of the seven systems will be bundled or compressed — and by any logic of difficulty allocation, the one made to suffer is almost certainly the system demanding the heaviest theory.

Among the seven listed systems, difficulty is not remotely uniform. The Colle (1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3), Torre Attack and Blackmar-Diemer Gambit can be grasped with plans plus a dozen concrete moves. The Trompowsky (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5) and London demand accuracy against ideas like ...c5, ...Ne4 or ...h6, and against the dark-squared bishop trade. Then there is the Catalan (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2) — and this is the real problem.

Because the Catalan is not a sideline system. It is mainline theory in the strict sense. It sits in precisely the theoretical category the advertisement claims White is fleeing.

I spent two days re-checking this, opening elite Catalan games from my database, cross-referencing specialist courses. A proper Catalan repertoire for Black — even at club level — must answer at least the following: after White plays g3 and Bg2, does Black choose the open structure with ...dxc4, ...b5 and ...Bb4+, or the closed structure with ...Nbd7, ...c6, ...b6? What then? How to handle the dark-squared bishop trade? What happens when White develops Ne5? At the top level, the Catalan is among the most heavily analysed openings of the past two decades — Kramnik–Anand, Carlsen–Caruana, and the entire career of Boris Gelfand with this system.

One video, out of six, cannot carry that weight. One-twelfth of a course's runtime cannot replace a dedicated Catalan reference. And a club-level buyer who trusts the advertisement will walk into a game against a White player who understands the Catalan the way a child walks into a forest without a map.

The second opening-technical issue: move order. The advertisement frames the entire product as what happens "after 1.d4 d5". But the Trompowsky proper (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5, ECO A45) arises before Black commits to ...d5. If Black has already played ...d5, White can only reach a different, more loosely named line, 1.d4 d5 2.Bg5. These are two entirely different move-order decisions leading to two different structures. The "after 1...d5" framing erases that distinction, and for a player building a repertoire, that is no small detail.

The third structural point I must record: the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.e4) is a romantic gambit — Black sacrifices a pawn for the initiative. Placing it alongside the Colle and London in one list makes it hard for buyers to see that these are three different demands: one is a slow build-up, one is an aggressive system, one is a trap sometimes dismissed as insufficiently theoretical to take seriously.

Contrarian angle: the danger is misplaced

The advertisement contradicts itself in an interesting place. It writes that White's approach is "not very ambitious" in one section, yet stresses that these same systems are "extremely dangerous" in another. These claims are not strictly contradictory in chess terms, but they force the reader to clarify: dangerous in what sense?

The answer, based on my experience watching thousands of club games, is this: the danger does not lie in the objective assessment of the position, but in the risk of strategic drift. White holds no opening advantage, but White gets a risk-free game. If Black does not know the characteristic plan, Black plays reasonable but directionless moves while White quietly accumulates space and eventually a better middlegame. A buyer who reads "extremely dangerous" and assumes the openings are theoretically strong is mis-calibrated from the starting point.

This is where the opening-course economy reveals its limits. The ad copy need not lie. One simply selects the tone intensity that matches the buyer's pain point — and the pain point of a club player is always the sense of being slowly, quietly crushed. That feeling is real. But it does not mean those openings hold an objective advantage.

There is another gap I noted when comparing the seven-system list against modern club reality: the Jobava-Prie London (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bf4) does not appear. This has been one of the most popular anti-establishment systems at both club and grandmaster level in the past decade, popularised by Baadur Jobava and Richard Rapport. Alongside it: g3/Bg2 structures without c4 — sometimes called "Pseudo-Catalan" — continue to grow in frequency. A Black repertoire built on the "1...d5 + sideline plans" frame naturally misses them. The document says nothing about either group, and I leave the question to the reader: if the course has only six videos for seven systems, how many minutes go to the Jobava London?

Takeaway: when chess memory no longer has room for quiet hands

I have followed Valeri Lilov's career since the 2000s, when he still appeared more regularly at the board. The only information the advertisement provides about him is two words: "IM" and "Bulgarian trainer". No current Elo, no recent events, no activity frequency. For an opening course, that means author authority rests on pedagogical clarity, not recent competitive results. And this is the bluntest conclusion I can offer after reading the entire document carefully: the product's real value lies in the plan layer for the London and Trompowsky — where it genuinely fills a gap. Its structural weakness lies in selling the Catalan as a sideline when the Catalan is a mainline.

The club player who buys this out of fear against the London System will be satisfied. The buyer who believes this is a complete Black repertoire against 1.d4 will be disappointed in the Catalan section, and possibly in the Jobava London section if they check. And the buyer who is simply curious about the "royal road" will realise, after a few hours of viewing, that the road is still long, still full of forks, and still requires a companion who can read a map.

Winter in Saint Petersburg is still long. I will keep sitting in that club, watching London games unfold as steadily as the city's breathing. And I will think of the man handling Black that night, who sighed that he did not know what to do. Perhaps a six-video course will help him. Perhaps not. But this much is certain: when the chessboard no longer holds patient hands willing to analyse each position, chess memory will begin to score with numbers nobody verifies.

Tonight, at the small club on Rubinsteina Street, I understood that the royal road — der richtige Königsweg — never existed. And perhaps that is exactly why we keep walking.