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.
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2h 20m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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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3h 19m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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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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.
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1h 34m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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There is a familiar trade-off behind every solid opening: depth costs time. The Caro-Kann is famous for its reliability, but reaching top-level fluency in it has traditionally meant working through hundreds of pages of theory. Caro-Kann Express for Black is built on the opposite premise — that a complete, tournament-ready repertoire can be delivered without cutting the quality of the recommendations. This is not a lightweight repertoire built from scratch; it is drawn from a complete deep series and trimmed to the lines that actually decide tournament games.
Sequence: Caro-Kann According to Dreev »
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2h 12m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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The Berlin Defense is one of the most fascinating and historically rich openings in chess. Renowned for its solidity and the challenges White faces in finding new ideas, the Berlin Defense has become so effective that it has even caused many players to reconsider the traditional Ruy Lopez. In this course, Pier Luigi Basso aims to equip you with a reliable and rock-solid repertoire, but not one that simply settles for a draw—this course will show you how to play for a win!
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4h 25m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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Ask an experienced Caro-Kann player where the half-points actually leak away, and the answer is almost never the main lines. It is the quiet second move nobody revised in a while — the Fantasy, the King's Indian Attack, an offbeat 2.Ne2 — where preparation thins out and a comfortable position quietly drifts into something worse.
Across a long career, few players have done more to give the Caro-Kann its modern standing than GM Alexey Dreev. In this final volume he turns that authority to exactly the parts of the opening most repertoires leave half-finished.
Sequence: Caro-Kann According to Dreev »
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3h 42m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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GM Pier Luigi Basso presents a complete Black repertoire in the Scandinavian Defence with 3...Qa5 — the most active and ambitious queen retreat, supported by ...Nc6 and ...O-O-O. Across 14 chapters built on cutting-edge correspondence practice and 2024-2025 novelties, the course turns one of the most structurally certain Black openings into a practical scoring weapon.
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2h 23m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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For decades, the French Defense has demanded a complete answer to White's alternatives. Players comfortable against the Advance, Tarrasch, or Steinitz often find themselves unprepared when White sidesteps theory with 2.d3, 2.Qe2, or the deceptively simple Exchange Variation. GM Szymon Gumularz and GM Pier Luigi Basso now complete their French Defense series by tackling precisely these gaps—offering a unified repertoire against every system White can throw at you after 1.e4 e6.
Sequence: French Defense According to Gumularz »
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4h 28m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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Viktor Korchnoi didn't play the French Defense — he fought with it. While Rubinstein gave the opening its strategic foundations and Petrosian refined it into a tool of prophylactic perfection, Korchnoi transformed the French into something entirely different: a weapon of uncompromising combativeness. This third volume in GM Pier Luigi Basso's Understand the French Defense series presents the opening through the eyes of one of history's most resilient fighters, revealing how "ugly" positions and concrete energy can overcome even the most objectively balanced evaluations.
Sequence: 1.e4 Structures »
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2h 7m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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