Every Sicilian player learns the same warning early: do not hand White a permanent grip on d5. A knight installed there, with no pawn left to challenge it, is the textbook picture of a Sicilian gone wrong. The Kalashnikov opens by ignoring that warning on move four.
After 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 e5, Black kicks the knight and concedes d5 — not for a moment, but for the rest of the game. Kazakouski is honest about how it looks; his first coach, he writes, would faint at the sight of it. Yet the position Black gets is the opposite of a wreck: quick, natural development, pieces landing on active squares, and a White player left holding a "hole" that still has to be shown to matter. The wager running through the whole repertoire is that, most of the time, it doesn't.
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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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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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2h 50m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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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1h 34m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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.
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3h 28m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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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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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.
Sequence: Jospem versus the Sicilian »
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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.
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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
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6h 26m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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.
Sequence: Jospem versus the Sicilian »
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4h 38m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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