Every Classical Sicilian player has a 6.Bg5 file. Ask them to meet it and the answers come quickly, deeply, with confidence. Then White plays 6.Be2, or 6.Bc4, or 6.Be3, or 6.f3 — and the same well-prepared player is suddenly improvising.
These are "sidelines" only because most preparation ignores them, not because they're harmless. Meet one unprepared and the game doesn't crash — it drifts. A natural move here, a slightly worse structure there, until you're defending something you expected to enjoy.
Part of the difficulty is that these tries don't share a single character. 6.Be2 invites a slow, restrained middlegame; 6.Bc4 plants the bishop on Black's most sensitive diagonal; 6.Be3 and 6.f3 point toward the sharp, opposite-side race of English Attack structures. One block of memorized theory was never going to hold them all together, and that is the problem GM Rodrigo Vasquez set out to solve.
He isn't offering new theory to be memorized. He's sharing this material the way he teaches it to his own students — through complete model games, where the plans, the recurring structures, and Black's concrete resources unfold move by move.
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The Caro-Kann has spent most of its life being praised for the wrong thing. Solid. Sound. Structurally impeccable. All true — and all of it has left the opening with a reputation as the defence you choose when a draw would do. GM Abdulla Gadimbayli picked it up for precisely the opposite reason.
He is candid about how he arrived there. A grandmaster from Azerbaijan rated 2524, he spent much of his career struggling for a reliable answer to 1.e4 — and his style, by his own account, has never leaned towards solid games. For a long time the answer was 1...e6. Then he turned to 1...c6, and found something he had not expected: an opening offering an unusual number of ways for Black to play for the win. This course is the result of that work, and his first for Modern Chess.
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Aron Nimzowitsch built a whole way of playing on one unsettling idea: invite your opponent to advance, then turn that advance into a weakness. The Sicilian line that carries his name follows exactly this logic. After 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nf6, Black provokes 3.e5 and then goes to work against it with ...e6 and ...d6.
In The Underrated Nimzowitsch Sicilian - Complete Repertoire for Black, GM Alexey Dreev presents this as one of the most underestimated answers to 1.e4 — a line he calls a personal favorite. He has trusted it in his own games against Caruana and Matlakov, and the course is written in his first-person voice, with GM Pier Luigi Basso as co-author.
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For most of the Steinitz's history, 5.f4 was the main move. It was where White claimed the most space, and where every French player braced for the main fight. That has quietly changed. Modern theory has worked the 5.f4 lines out so concretely that White struggles to prove anything real — and a second front has opened at 5.Nce2, the positional try where understanding matters more than memory. Part 1 of GM Andrea Stella's Steinitz answers both, and treats them as two different problems needing two different kinds of preparation.
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This course presents a practical Ruy Lopez repertoire based on the Modern Archangel variation (4...Bc5), as employed by GM Praggnanandhaa. Offering a sound alternative to the theory-heavy Berlin and Marshall lines, the system follows a clear strategic blueprint: bishop to a7, knight via e7 to g6, and the thematic ...Bb4+ check to disrupt White's center. GM Sina Movahed covers all critical responses, providing a double-edged yet reliable repertoire where understanding plans and typical maneuvers matters far more than memorizing endless variations.
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For decades, the Italian Game has been an awkward place to be as Black. The quiet maneuvering plans and the many move orders leave plenty of room to drift, and it is easy to end up passively placed with no clear idea. Movahed's answer sidesteps the heavily analyzed main lines that follow 4...Nf6. After 3...Bc5 he meets 4.c3 with the flexible 4...d6, lets White build the center with d4, and only then drops the bishop back to b6 — giving up a pawn to seize the initiative before White can consolidate.
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The Ruy Lopez is usually White's kind of fight. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5, the familiar roads lead to slow, deeply mapped positions where White keeps the tension and sets the pace, while Black spends the middlegame answering questions rather than asking them.
The modest-looking 3...g6 changes that on move three. Black declares the character of the game at once: fianchetto the bishop, aim it down the long diagonal at White's centre, and head for an unbalanced struggle where the full point is a genuine target for both sides. As Pier Luigi Basso frames it in the introduction, this is a way to fight the Spanish and play for a complicated game — not to equalise quietly, but to reach positions with rich play for either side.
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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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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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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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