Courses (142)

There is a kind of player who spends an entire career inside 1.d4, 1.c4, and 1.Nf3, and never once feels the pull of 1.e4. GM Tamás Bánusz was one of them. Then, by his own account, he had "a sudden moment of madness," opened 1.e4 for the first time, and went looking for a way to handle the 2…d6 Sicilian. What he found was 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.c3 — and, in his words, he fell in love.

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.

The Open Sicilian has never really been a single opening. It is a dozen separate wars — the Najdorf, the Dragon, the Sveshnikov, the Taimanov — each with its own theory, its own tabiyas, its own library of grandmaster games. What ties them together in the hands of GM Pier Luigi Basso is one instruction, repeated from the opening moves of every system: go for the attack, period.
That sentence is the foundation of this course. Where most Open Sicilian repertoires ask you to memorize seven different philosophies, the Open Sicilian Express asks you to absorb one — and then shows you the concrete form it takes in each system: the Be3-and-g4 pawn storm against the Taimanov, the Yugoslav Attack against the Dragon, the immediate 7.Nd5 against the Sveshnikov, the modern f4-and-Nb3 plan against the Najdorf.

The Najdorf is the most ambitious reply to 1.e4, but its main lines are also some of the most exhaustively mapped territory in all of opening theory. Part 2 confronts White's sharpest weapons — 6.Be3, 6.f3, 6.h3, and the forcing 6.Bg5 — and answers them not with the heaviest book lines, but with sound, comparatively unexplored continuations chosen to keep the position alive and play for a win.

For years, Nijat Abasov was known at the board as a Sveshnikov player. The Najdorf was something he kept to the side — studied closely, valued, but rarely shown in his own games. This course is where that private repertoire finally comes into the open, and by his own admission, it is the point where the opening crosses over from his preparation into his tournament play.
That openness is the heart of Abasov's debut on Modern Chess. He is not selling a system he was handed; he is opening a folder he has kept to himself, explaining in his own words why, after a career built on a different Sicilian, the Najdorf is the line he keeps returning to a first course from a World Cup semifinalist

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.

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.

Sometimes a single move, played almost in passing by an elite grandmaster, contains more poison than a thousand pages of established theory. When GM Luis Supi watched GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov reach for 7.Be2 against the Sveshnikov Sicilian, his first reaction was disbelief. He knows this opening as well as anyone, yet here was a move he had never seriously considered — and the more he searched for a refutation, the clearer it became that there wasn't one. What looked like a casual sidestep turned out to be a genuine, and currently underrated, way to fight one of Black's most reliable defences.

When Bobby Fischer called the Paulsen "one of Black's soundest defenses," he was acknowledging something fundamental: flexibility without predictability. Half a century later, GM Harshit Raja's new course revives this principle for the modern game. Where the Najdorf forces immediate concrete knowledge and the Dragon demands theoretical precision move by move, the Paulsen offers something rarer — strategic maneuverability combined with genuine winning chances. Harshit's repertoire is built around 5...a6, a move order that delays ...Qc7 and preserves Black's options across multiple pawn structures.

When GM Daniil Dubov unveiled his ...h5 Dragon setup at the elite level, many thought the Yugoslav Attack needed renovation. When Magnus Carlsen started mixing Dragon structures with Najdorf timing via the Dragdorf, others wondered if White's classical approach still held water. The authors of this course — GM Jose Martinez Alcantara, IM Dragos Ceres, and GM Pier Luigi Basso — came to a different conclusion: the Yugoslav Attack doesn't need to be abandoned. It needs to be rebuilt with precision tools that account for every modern deviation Black has invented over the past decade.