Courses (1087)

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.

Every strong player knows the feeling: a comfortable middlegame, no forcing lines anywhere in sight, and yet the clock keeps ticking while you try to calculate something — anything. Yet very often — more often than you might think — middlegame positions contain nothing to calculate at all. The reflex to calculate regardless is precisely what lands talented players in trouble.
This course is built around that reversal. Where preparation ends and no concrete lines exist, the decisive skill is recognition — setting the position beside the many you already carry in memory, and recalling the plan rather than creating it.

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.

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.

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.

Chess literature overflows with books on attack, yet the equally decisive skill of defence is left almost untrained. In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger fills that gap through prophylactic thinking — the habit of anticipating your opponent's plans and neutralising them before they arrive, ideally with a move that improves your own position at the same time. Across exercises and annotated model games from defenders like Lasker, Korchnoi and Tal, it trains both halves of great defence: the strategic anticipation that keeps you out of danger, and the tactical resources that save you when danger comes anyway.

When the kings castle on opposite wings, the game becomes a race — both sides hurl their pawns at the enemy king, and a single tempo separates a winning attack from a losing one. In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger trains the whole toolkit of that race through exercises and annotated model games: exchanging the key defenders, forcing weaknesses, timing the sacrifice, and knowing when to switch to counterplay before the opponent's attack arrives first. Drawing on games from Tal and Fischer to Kramnik and Gelfand, it teaches the hardest balance in chess — attacking as fast as possible without ever attacking prematurely.

Opposite-coloured bishops have a reputation for drawishness — but that verdict only holds in the endgame; in the middlegame, the same imbalance turns the bishop into a devastating attacker with no opposite number to stop it. In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger works through all four faces of the position across carefully selected exercises and annotated model games: the middlegame attack, strategic play to increase an advantage, converting an extra pawn, and defending the ending. Drawing on games from Rubinstein and Smyslov to Carlsen and Ding, it teaches you to recognise when the opposite bishops draw, when they win, and how to steer the play so they do what you need.

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.