Courses (102)

Around 1610, the Italian master Giulio Cesare Polerio set down a knight sacrifice so violent that his countrymen named it after what it left on the board: the Fegatello, the "fried liver." Four centuries later, the same leap onto f7 is still one of the most direct ways to drag Black's king into the open. And the wider 4.Ng5 attack, rather than being refuted by modern engines, has been re-armed by them.

The move that sets it all in motion, 4.Ng5, looks almost like a beginner's lunge. That is exactly its value. From that moment every line revolves around a single square, f7, and Black is forced to solve concrete problems from the very first moves.

Few openings carry a pedigree quite like this one. The Evans Gambit was conceived in 1827 by William Davies Evans, a Welsh sea captain, and every attacking generation since has reached back for it — Morphy and Chigorin in the romantic era, and later Kasparov, who reintroduced it at the highest level against Anand in 1995. It is one of those ideas that never truly retires; each generation rediscovers its bite and adds something of its own.
That is exactly what GM Baadur Jobava and GM Pier Luigi Basso do here. The gambit's logic is unchanged since 1827: after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.b4, White hands over a pawn to gain time on the bishop, build a broad centre with c3 and d4, and open lines straight toward f7. What is new is the modern, engine-tested precision the authors bring to it — including a fresh queenside idea in the main line that gives the whole system a second life.

Every King's Indian player knows the feeling. Against White's classical setups there is always a plan to reach for — the ...f5 break, the pawn storm, the race on opposite wings. Against the Fianchetto, none of it applies.
White tucks the bishop on g2, keeps the centre closed and elastic, and settles in for a slow positional squeeze. There is no attack to launch and little forcing theory to lean on, so Black is often worn down without ever being clearly worse. King's Indian Defense for Black — Fight the Fianchetto Variation, by GM Baadur Jobava and GM Andrea Stella, is built to close that gap.

The Queen’s Gambit Accepted has long been regarded as a practical and reliable choice for Black—a way to avoid the heavy theoretical load of the Queen’s Gambit Declined while maintaining solid positions. Baadur Jobava, however, saw something more: a dynamic system capable of fighting for the initiative from the very first moves.

Some openings are not refuted so much as inherited as refuted. The Lowenthal is the textbook case. For decades it was called dubious, then written off as refuted outright, and most players believed that and moved on. GM Baadur Jobava's starting point is that nobody went back to check the evidence with modern tools — and that when you do, the picture changes. The engine era, so often the executioner of romantic systems, turns out to be the Lowenthal's best defence attorney.
That is the leitmotif running through all nine chapters, including the famous engine "refutation" with 13.Be2 that keeps most players away from the variation entirely. Jobava's conclusion is stated plainly: Black holds, all the way down to a draw the opponent will never find over the board.

Every Sicilian player has felt it: years invested in the Najdorf, the Dragon, or the Classical Sicilian, only to face a 2.Nc3 or 2.c3 from an opponent who clearly knows the position better. The statistics explain why. The Open Sicilian shows up far more often across a career than any single Anti-Sicilian system, so the experience naturally tilts away from these sidelines.
That imbalance is exactly where games get lost — not to superior chess, but to superior preparation in territory the Black player rarely visits.

"A knight on the rim is dim." Few maxims are drilled into beginners more often — and few are refuted more elegantly than by 7...Na6 in the Classical King's Indian. The knight steps to the edge not to linger there, but to spring into c5, where it pressures e4 while Black's central counterplay gathers force.
That paradox runs through the whole of Part 4. Instead of the dense, move-for-move theory demanded by 7...Nc6 or 7...Nbd7, Black gets a repertoire organized around recurring ideas: the ...Na6–c5 route, the flexible ...Qe7, reinforcing e5 while keeping all options open, and the thematic ...Ng4 and ...f5 breaks. The same plans reappear against almost everything White tries, so understanding carries the load rather than memorization.

For most of its history, 3.exd5 has been the move you play when you are happy to shake hands. Symmetrical pawn structure, an open centre, nothing structural to fight over — the Exchange French earned a reputation as the most peaceful reply to the French, the line you reach for on a tired afternoon. So it means something that one of the most inventive attacking players of his generation has built a serious repertoire with real winning chances.
In The Exchange French — Top-Level Repertoire for White, GM Baadur Jobava and GM Pier Luigi Basso set out to dismantle that cliché. The symmetry, they argue, is deceptive: beneath it lies a structure full of small, durable imbalances, and the better-prepared side can lean on them until they decide the game. This is the Exchange French as a fighting choice, not a truce.

We are excited to introduce English Opening – Jobava’s Repertoire, the latest course by GM Baadur Jobava and GM Pier Luigi Basso. This course provides a complete and aggressive repertoire for Black against the English Opening, based on 1.c4 c5.

This course is the final piece in Jobava’s Full Repertoire for Black Against the Closed Openings, following his two highly successful courses:
1) The Ambitious Queen's Gambit Accepted
2) Jobava London Reversed – Top-Level Repertoire for Black
By combining these three courses, you will have a fully structured and practical repertoire against 1.d4, 1.c4, and all Closed Openings, crafted by one of the most creative and aggressive players of our time, GM Baadur Jobava.

Ask a Petroff player where they actually lose games, and the answer is rarely the heavily studied main line. It is the 3.d4 they never looked at, the quiet knight retreat that turns into a slow squeeze, the offbeat third move that drags them somewhere unfamiliar before the position even settles. Those losses come from the lines filed under "sidelines" — which is precisely the word this volume sets out to retire.
Part 2 completes the repertoire begun in Part 1. Where the first volume settled the absolute main line with 3.Nxe5, this one covers every other White attempt after 2.Nf3 Nf6 — and the largest of them is anything but a sideline.