Courses (357)

For over a century the Tarrasch has carried a verdict it never earned — that Black concedes an isolated pawn on move four and defends it for the rest of the game; this Platinum repertoire by GM Pier Luigi Basso and IM Dragos Ceres begins from the opposite premise, using the early ...c5 and the thematic ...c4 push to gain space, fix White's structure, and play for the initiative. Built on the modern 5...Nf6 move order across 15 chapters and 100 test positions, it answers every White system after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 — the Fianchetto mainlines, the Bg5 tries, the Symmetrical e3 setups and the sidelines — with the plans behind the moves, not just the moves.

The move is ...a6, and it has followed him for decades — first in the Chebanenko Slav, where 4...a6 became his signature, and then one move later, in the quiet lines where White declines to force anything at all. In The Slow Slav for Black – Strategic Foundations, Malakhov explains what that pawn is actually doing, and what kind of middlegame it produces.

he King's Indian rests on a bargain. Black hands over the centre and the space, pushes ...e5, and after White closes the position with d5, Black receives in exchange the one thing that makes the whole opening worth playing: the kingside attack. The pawn break with f5 and a potential pawn storm, rook lift, and a potentially devastating attack.
The Makogonov System cancels that bargain. After 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.h3, White plays the quietest move on the board — and it turns out to be the first move of the most aggressive plan available. The pawn on h3 takes ...Ng4 and ...Bg4 away, which allows Be3 without harassment, and it prepares g2-g4. The break Black has been counting on since move one now costs far more to arrange, and it is White who takes the kingside first.

When Black answers the Exchange Queen's Gambit with 5...Bb4, the intention is transparent: steer the game into the Ragozin, one of the most reliable three-results weapons in modern practice. The Carlsbad has anchored White's play here for a century, from club events to World Championship matches, and its pull has never depended on fashion.
What GMs Luca Moroni and Pier Luigi Basso propose is a quiet act of defiance. Instead of the automatic 6.Nf3, they hold the knight on g1 and answer 6.e3! — declining the standard Ragozin move order and handing Black a version of the position he would rather not have. That knight staying home is the whole idea, keeping White flexible and reaching a more comfortable middlegame than the one Black prepared for.

A player who has never once answered 1.d4 d5 2.c4 with 2...dxc4 can still spend a career inside the Queen's Gambit Accepted structure. It appears from the Catalan. It appears from the Queen's Indian and the Nimzo-Indian. It appears whenever the c- and d-files open, White's d4-pawn faces the ...c5 break, and the game can reduce to a fight over two key squares: c3 and c6.
That is the argument at the heart of Queen's Gambit Accepted Structures, the new volume in the Malakhov's Structures series by GM Vladimir Malakhov and GM Pier Luigi Basso. Their premise is that a formation reachable from half a dozen different openings earns study on its own terms — not instead of the lines that lead to it, but alongside them.

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.

Preparing against the Grunfeld normally means preparing against several different lines at once. Black's pressure on the white centre can arrive from ...Na5, ...b6, ...Qc7, ...e6, ...Bd7 or ...Bg4, and the standard solution is a separate scheme for each — one more plan to hold in your head at the board.
A Practical Repertoire against the Grunfeld by GM Valery Kazakouski and GM Pier Luigi Basso is built on the opposite principle. After 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5 4.cxd5 Nxd5 5.e4 Nxc3 6.bxc3 Bg7, the authors recommend 7.Bc4, and from there a single aggressive blueprint runs through every line: Ne2, castle, Be3, Rb1, and the f4-f5 pawn storm. Ten chapters, one huge centre, and the same set of ideas in each of them.

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.

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.

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.