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.
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1h and 34min PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Video Content
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The London System survives on a simple promise — White never has to think, assembling the same setup no matter what Black does. GM Mitrabha Guha's repertoire refuses that arrangement from the start: after 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bf4 d5 3.e3 c5, Black strikes at d4 immediately, brings the knight to c6, and pins the defender with ...Bg4, denying White the undisturbed development the system depends on. Built on one repeatable scheme you can play game after game, it turns the London from an opening you tolerate into familiar territory where Black is the one asking the questions.
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2h and 18min PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Video Content
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Some ideas live in a coach's private files for years before they reach anyone else. This repertoire is one of them. GM Alexey Dreev built the 2...b6 system for his own students over many seasons, and he shares the reason plainly in his introduction: this is a line prepared to play for a win with Black, and to sidestep the forced draws that so often decide games against 1.d4.
The move itself is the statement of intent. After 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 b6!?, Black declines the well-trodden Classical Queen's Indian (2...e6 3.Nf3 b6) in favor of something sharper. The queenside fianchetto arrives a tempo earlier and on Black's own terms, and the resulting positions carry more tension and far more winning potential than the structures Black is usually steered into here.
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3h and 13min PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Video Content
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Reykjavik, 1972, Game 5. Boris Spassky plays the Nimzo-Indian's most popular system, and Bobby Fischer answers with an idea that looks almost careless: he captures on c3 without waiting for a3, voluntarily giving up the bishop pair. Then comes the point — ...d6, ...e5, and a blockade that slowly suffocates White's position. Twenty-seven moves later, Spassky resigns.
That blockading concept, refined by GM Robert Hübner in the late 1960s and 1970s, is the foundation of GM Mitrabha Guha's new course. Against the Rubinstein System with 4.e3 — by far White's most popular reply — Guha recommends exactly the Hübner treatment: 4...c5 followed by an early exchange on c3 and the strategic clamp with ...d6 and ...e5. It is a repertoire built on plans, not on memorizing long lines of theory.
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3h and 14min PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice Video Content
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The King's Indian Defense has never been an opening for players content with a draw. It is the choice of World Champions like Fischer, Tal, Spassky and Kasparov, and modern stars such as Hikaru Nakamura and Teimour Radjabov, who wanted to fight for the initiative as Black from the very first moves. Its logic is deliberately provocative: Black concedes the center, lets White build it, and stakes everything on dynamic counterplay.
That fighting spirit has a precise face in this repertoire. In the Classical main line, GM Aydin Suleymanli does not steer into the most heavily analyzed channels — he reaches for 7...Bg4, a rare idea in which Black is perfectly content to give up the light-squared bishop for White's knight. It is the King's Indian bargain in miniature: trade a small concession for clarity and activity, then play for the win.
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5h and 42min PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice Video Content
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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.
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For most of chess history, voluntarily handing your opponent a broad pawn center looked less like a plan and more like a concession. The King's Indian Defense turned that instinct on its head. After 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6, Black invites White to occupy the center with pawns and then sets out to undermine it with timely counterplay — a hypermodern provocation in the 1930s that, over the following decades, became one of Black's most trusted ways to play for a win against 1.d4.
GM Mitrabha Guha builds the course around that evolution rather than around a wall of theory. He traces how understanding of the King's Indian deepened across nearly nine decades of practice — from the foundational games of the 1930s, through Fischer's win over Korchnoi in 1970 and the Korchnoi–Kasparov clash of 1992, up to Praggnanandhaa–Giri in 2022. The structures repeat and the ideas accumulate, so that following them in order teaches you to feel the opening rather than memorize it.
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"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.
Sequence: King's Indian Defense According to Jobava »
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5h and 20min PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice Video Content
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Modern French preparation has narrowed. A handful of fashionable tabiyas now absorb most of White's attention, and the analysis around them runs deep. GM Felix Blohberger's second volume goes the other way — down older, classical roads that White players have quietly stopped studying.
That choice is the connective tissue of Part 2, which completes the repertoire begun in Practical French for Black — Part 1. Where the first volume handled 3.Nc3 and the early sidelines, this database covers everything that remains after 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5: the Advance, the Tarrasch, and the Exchange.
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1h and 48min PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Video Content
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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.
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2h and 21min PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice Video Content
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