Courses (1087)

For most of the last century, the Exchange Caro-Kann was filed under "harmless." It was the line you reached for when you wanted a clear structure and a quiet afternoon — no early sharpness, a position that supposedly explained itself. And yet strong players kept coming back to it, generation after generation, and each one understood it a little differently. What looked like a settled position turned out to be a slow, hundred-year conversation about a single pawn structure.
That conversation is the spine of GM Mahammad Muradli's new course. The Exchange Caro-Kann — Strategic Foundations is the strategic companion to his earlier theoretical work, The Exchange Caro-Kann with 4.Bd3 for White. The first course mapped the concrete lines after 3.exd5 cxd5 4.Bd3 and laid out Muradli's practical answers to Black's many tries. This one steps back from the variations to ask the harder question: once you reach these positions, how do you actually understand and play them?

Ask a Petroff player where they actually lose games, and the answer is rarely the heavily studied main line. It is the 3.d4 they never looked at, the quiet knight retreat that turns into a slow squeeze, the offbeat third move that drags them somewhere unfamiliar before the position even settles. Those losses come from the lines filed under "sidelines" — which is precisely the word this volume sets out to retire.
Part 2 completes the repertoire begun in Part 1. Where the first volume settled the absolute main line with 3.Nxe5, this one covers every other White attempt after 2.Nf3 Nf6 — and the largest of them is anything but a sideline.

The Petroff has spent decades filed under the wrong heading. Mention it at a club and someone will say "drawn" before the second knight even comes out. Yet it is the opening Caruana, Nepomniachtchi, Aronian and So have trusted in World Championship matches and Candidates Tournaments — the highest-stakes games of their careers, where they needed something they could lean on completely.
That contradiction runs through the whole course. The mirror image after 2...Nf6 looks peaceful, but the modern Petroff is a counterattacking system, not a passive one. GM Baadur Jobava — a player famous for the instinct of chaos and the initiative — makes the case for it openly, and his endorsement carries weight precisely because it is unexpected.

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

This is the third and final volume of Malakhov's Chebanenko trilogy, and by design it is the least theoretical of the three. The first two courses gave Black the complete repertoire — the exact moves and the modern evaluations after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 a6. This course answers the question those materials deliberately left open: once you know what to play, how do you actually play the middlegame?

Some ideas survive a century of theory precisely because nobody thinks to question them. The bishop's natural squares in the French Advance are d3, e2, and occasionally b5 only after the pawn structure has settled. In Fight the French Defense — A Repertoire, GM Luis Supi asks a simpler, sharper question: what if the bishop arrives on b5 before White has even played d4? The answer reorganizes an entire branch of the French around a single, unexpected move.

Following the success of the 1.d4 According to Dreev series, GM Alexey Dreev and GM Pier Luigi Basso return with a powerful new chapter—Fight the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. This course provides a complete and ambitious repertoire for White after:
1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.e4
This aggressive continuation challenges Black from the very first moves, setting the tone for dynamic and initiative-driven play. Unlike more reserved systems, 3.e4 seizes central space and creates immediate tactical and strategic dilemmas for the opponent.

The Bishop's Opening occupies a peculiar space in chess theory — once dismissed as toothless, yet respected enough to appear in grandmaster practice whenever a player seeks something concrete beyond the endless preparation wars of 2.Nf3.
GM Mahammad Muradli's new course reframes the opening entirely: not as a quiet sideline, but as an aggressive system built around keeping f2-f4 available. By developing the bishop before the knight, White preserves maximum flexibility in the center and prepares to launch kingside attacks across multiple setups — echoes of the King's Gambit and Vienna Game, but with the light-squared bishop already developed and f7 under immediate pressure.

At the top level, the French has drifted toward equality. The fashionable 7...cxd4 8.Nxd4 Qb6!? is now mapped so deeply that many games are decided before the middlegame begins.
GM Felix Blohberger builds his repertoire around a different idea — steering Black into lightly explored positions where both sides still have to play real chess. The emblem of that approach is a move you will rarely find in a database: 7...h6!?, preparing the disruptive ...g5 break.