The Ruy Lopez is usually White's kind of fight. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5, the familiar roads lead to slow, deeply mapped positions where White keeps the tension and sets the pace, while Black spends the middlegame answering questions rather than asking them.
The modest-looking 3...g6 changes that on move three. Black declares the character of the game at once: fianchetto the bishop, aim it down the long diagonal at White's centre, and head for an unbalanced struggle where the full point is a genuine target for both sides. As Pier Luigi Basso frames it in the introduction, this is a way to fight the Spanish and play for a complicated game — not to equalise quietly, but to reach positions with rich play for either side.
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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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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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When Vladimir Kramnik answered 1.e4 with the Berlin Defence across his 2000 World Championship match with Garry Kasparov, he wasn't reviving a forgotten line so much as redefining the terms of engagement. The Berlin doesn't fight for the initiative; it quietly denies White one. Many years later, that logic still holds at the very top, which is exactly what makes the opening so awkward to face. You cannot refute the Berlin — but you don't have to let it go quiet, either.
The Ruy Lopez for White – Part 4 is GM Kalyan Arjun's response to that challenge. Rather than chase a knockout that isn't there, he builds a repertoire designed to keep the position tense — to preserve small imbalances long after Black expected the game to settle into a lifeless, drawn-out endgame.
Sequence: Arjun's Ruy Lopez »
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Openings usually take the name of an inventor or a city. 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.g3 took the name of a player instead — not because Nodirbek Abdusattorov invented it, but because he made it his own and kept winning with it. Others noticed. Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, and Rapport picked it up, and what had been a modest third move turned into a recognized way to fight for the initiative against 1...e5. GM Pier Luigi Basso's A Powerful 3.g3 Repertoire against 1...e5 traces how that transformation happened and hands you the ideas behind it.
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Before the 2024 Candidates Tournament, GM Arjun Kalyan handed Praggnanandhaa an idea in a training camp: the sharp early ...f5 break in the Ruy Lopez, reached after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 f5.
Then Praggnanandhaa used it to beat Vidit Gujrathi, and a little-known sideline became something White players could no longer afford to ignore.
That episode sets the tone for Part 3. This is not a course about the main line 4...Nf6 — it is about everything Black plays on the 4th move instead of it.
Sequence: Arjun's Ruy Lopez »
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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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Nimzowitsch's old advice — take any central pawn if it can be done without too much danger — is the whole justification for the Open Variation. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.O-O, 5...Nxe4 grabs the central pawn and keeps the knight aggressively posted. The lost pawn itself is temporary — White recovers it on e5 — so the real struggle is over that knight: neutralise it, as Kalyan puts it, and the position turns in White's favour.
It is a line Arjun Kalyan respects without affection. In his own words, it was one he never considered playing as Black: full of positions where Black suffers yet the engine somehow holds, and a line that demands a great deal of theory from whoever takes it on. Part 2 is built around that tension — how to meet Black's most ambitious, best-prepared replies without walking straight into the theory they have memorised.
Sequence: Arjun's Ruy Lopez »
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Most repertoires are built on a line the author fell in love with. This one is built on a line the author once ran from. As a Black player, GM Arjun Kalyan found the deferred exchange in the Ruy Lopez so persistently annoying that he eventually switched to the Arkhangelsk just to avoid facing it. Part 1 of his Ruy Lopez series takes that very discomfort and hands it to White.
The thread running through the whole course is timing. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.O-O Be7, White captures with 6.Bxc6 — but precisely now, once the bishop has already committed to e7. Black would like nothing more than to recapture and reroute the bishop to d6; instead, it must spend a tempo to get there. The damaged queenside structure and the lasting pressure on e5 are the constants that every chapter returns to.
Sequence: Arjun's Ruy Lopez »
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Modern French preparation has narrowed. A handful of fashionable tabiyas now absorb most of White's attention, and the analysis around them runs deep. GM Felix Blohberger's second volume goes the other way — down older, classical roads that White players have quietly stopped studying.
That choice is the connective tissue of Part 2, which completes the repertoire begun in Practical French for Black — Part 1. Where the first volume handled 3.Nc3 and the early sidelines, this database covers everything that remains after 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5: the Advance, the Tarrasch, and the Exchange.
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