Courses (261)

There is a familiar trade-off behind every solid opening: depth costs time. The Caro-Kann is famous for its reliability, but reaching top-level fluency in it has traditionally meant working through hundreds of pages of theory. Caro-Kann Express for Black is built on the opposite premise — that a complete, tournament-ready repertoire can be delivered without cutting the quality of the recommendations. This is not a lightweight repertoire built from scratch; it is drawn from a complete deep series and trimmed to the lines that actually decide tournament games.

In 1931, Max Euwe and José Raúl Capablanca reached a position where Black had just sacrificed the exchange on a8. Capablanca, with the black pieces, stood better — and never realised it, repeating moves into a draw he should have been pressing to win.
Nearly a century later, that same position is the critical theoretical battleground of this repertoire. White's most testing engine moves still lead straight back to it, and Black is still playing for three results. That is the spirit of the whole course: principled, fighting, and built on lines that reward the player who understands them.

The Berlin Defense is one of the most fascinating and historically rich openings in chess. Renowned for its solidity and the challenges White faces in finding new ideas, the Berlin Defense has become so effective that it has even caused many players to reconsider the traditional Ruy Lopez. In this course, Pier Luigi Basso aims to equip you with a reliable and rock-solid repertoire, but not one that simply settles for a draw—this course will show you how to play for a win!

Ask an experienced Caro-Kann player where the half-points actually leak away, and the answer is almost never the main lines. It is the quiet second move nobody revised in a while — the Fantasy, the King's Indian Attack, an offbeat 2.Ne2 — where preparation thins out and a comfortable position quietly drifts into something worse.
Across a long career, few players have done more to give the Caro-Kann its modern standing than GM Alexey Dreev. In this final volume he turns that authority to exactly the parts of the opening most repertoires leave half-finished.

Löwenthal, O'Kelly, Nimzowitsch, Grivas and others — the Sicilian's minor roads are paved with the names of players who wanted no part of a theoretical main line. Each found a way to sidestep the Najdorf and the Sveshnikov and reach a position where preparation runs thin and the game is decided by understanding rather than memory. They are easy to underestimate, and that is exactly the problem: the half-points that slip away against a sideline you half-remember are the ones that quietly hold a rating in place. Sicilian Arsenal for White is the volume that answers all of them.

Few openings announce their intentions as openly as the Exchange Slav. After 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.cxd5 cxd5, White releases the central tension and accepts a symmetrical pawn structure. For most of its history this has been read as a peace offering: trade early, simplify, and steer toward a dry position where Black's best case is half a point.
Exchange Slav for Black — Top-Level Repertoire sets out to overturn that reading. Its premise, in GM Vladimir Malakhov's words, is that symmetry is not the same as a quiet life — Black can answer every White setup with positions that keep real winning chances on the board.

GM Pier Luigi Basso and GM Andrea Stella's bundle covers three openings — the Express Najdorf for Black against 1.e4, the Queen's Gambit Accepted with 3...b5!? against 1.d4, and the Catalan Siege for White — built on a single principle: learn structures, not variations. Across 14 chapters and 30 test positions, the bundle delivers a complete tournament repertoire that a serious player can put to use over a weekend.

For most of its history, the London System was the opening you reached for when you wanted a quiet life. Baadur Jobava changed the question. By slipping the knight to c3 before the bishop appears — 1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bf4 — he kept everything that made the London easy to learn and added what the classical version never had: a direct route to creating attacking chances. The early Nc3 unlocks the thematic Nb5 jump against the weak c7-square and clears the way for the Qd2–Bh6 plan against the fianchetto. That is the idea running through this repertoire from start to finish — the London, rebuilt as an attacking system.

GM Pier Luigi Basso presents a complete Black repertoire in the Scandinavian Defence with 3...Qa5 — the most active and ambitious queen retreat, supported by ...Nc6 and ...O-O-O. Across 14 chapters built on cutting-edge correspondence practice and 2024-2025 novelties, the course turns one of the most structurally certain Black openings into a practical scoring weapon.

When GM Valery Kazakouski and GM Pier Luigi Basso sat down to prepare a repertoire against 1.Nf3 d5 2.g3, they didn't reach for the well-trodden paths. Instead of guiding Black through the analyzed-to-death 2...Nf6 or 2...Bf5 systems, they chose a different route entirely: 2...Nd7.
The move looks counterintuitive at first glance—the knight blocks the c8-bishop and stands on the queen's line. But the logic is concrete. Black prepares ...e5 immediately, and after 3.d4, the knight moves to the ideal b6-square, where it defends d5 and frees the bishop to develop to f5 without tactical concerns.