Courses (71)

With 4.Bg5, White tries to change the subject. Rather than the direct 4.e5 that Part 1 was built to answer, the bishop develops and invites the French player onto different ground. Stella's reply, 4...Be7, quietly declines the argument — after 5.e5 the game folds straight back into the Steinitz pawn chain the whole repertoire is built around. The move meant to sidestep the Steinitz becomes another road into it.

The Scotch Game took its name from a correspondence match played in 1824 between the chess clubs of Edinburgh and London, where the Scottish side struck in the centre with 3.d4. It was a fixture of nineteenth-century play before slipping quietly out of fashion. Then Garry Kasparov brought it back to the very top, wheeling it out in World Championship play and reminding everyone that an early central strike still carries real venom. That is the spirit GM Mitrabha Guha builds on in The Scotch Game: A Modern Repertoire for White. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4, White challenges Black in the centre at once and plays for active pieces from the very first moves — no slow manoeuvring, no waiting for a plan to arrive.

The Caro-Kann has spent most of its life being praised for the wrong thing. Solid. Sound. Structurally impeccable. All true — and all of it has left the opening with a reputation as the defence you choose when a draw would do. GM Abdulla Gadimbayli picked it up for precisely the opposite reason. He is candid about how he arrived there. A grandmaster from Azerbaijan rated 2524, he spent much of his career struggling for a reliable answer to 1.e4 — and his style, by his own account, has never leaned towards solid games. For a long time the answer was 1...e6. Then he turned to 1...c6, and found something he had not expected: an opening offering an unusual number of ways for Black to play for the win. This course is the result of that work, and his first for Modern Chess.

When Richard Réti stopped occupying the center with pawns and chose instead to press on it from a distance, he was doing more than introducing a move order. He was refusing to play the game on his opponent's terms. A century later, that same instinct is what draws GM Nijat Abasov to the opening that still carries Réti's name. Abasov is candid about why he plays it. In today's most worked main lines, entire systems and even gambits have been analyzed to a dead draw, and the player with White is too often the one walking into the latest prepared novelty. The Reti steps off that treadmill. Rather than matching memory against memory, White keeps the center fluid, lets Black declare first, and shapes the character of the game from the opening moves.

For most of the Steinitz's history, 5.f4 was the main move. It was where White claimed the most space, and where every French player braced for the main fight. That has quietly changed. Modern theory has worked the 5.f4 lines out so concretely that White struggles to prove anything real — and a second front has opened at 5.Nce2, the positional try where understanding matters more than memory. Part 1 of GM Andrea Stella's Steinitz answers both, and treats them as two different problems needing two different kinds of preparation.

Every King's Indian player knows the feeling. Against White's classical setups there is always a plan to reach for — the ...f5 break, the pawn storm, the race on opposite wings. Against the Fianchetto, none of it applies. White tucks the bishop on g2, keeps the centre closed and elastic, and settles in for a slow positional squeeze. There is no attack to launch and little forcing theory to lean on, so Black is often worn down without ever being clearly worse. King's Indian Defense for Black — Fight the Fianchetto Variation, by GM Baadur Jobava and GM Andrea Stella, is built to close that gap.

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.

Reykjavik, 1972, Game 5. Boris Spassky plays the Nimzo-Indian's most popular system, and Bobby Fischer answers with an idea that looks almost careless: he captures on c3 without waiting for a3, voluntarily giving up the bishop pair. Then comes the point — ...d6, ...e5, and a blockade that slowly suffocates White's position. Twenty-seven moves later, Spassky resigns. That blockading concept, refined by GM Robert Hübner in the late 1960s and 1970s, is the foundation of GM Mitrabha Guha's new course. Against the Rubinstein System with 4.e3 — by far White's most popular reply — Guha recommends exactly the Hübner treatment: 4...c5 followed by an early exchange on c3 and the strategic clamp with ...d6 and ...e5. It is a repertoire built on plans, not on memorizing long lines of theory.

Part 1 gave White a reliable structure against Black's classical setups. Part 2 answers a different question: what happens when the opponent has done the homework? GMs Alexey Dreev and Pier Luigi Basso built this course around Black's sharpest, most computer-tested tries against 3.Bf4 — the exact positions a well-prepared opponent will steer toward today. The repertoire doesn't just patch holes; it turns the London into what Dreev calls "a complete, future-proof weapon."

The King's Indian Defense has never been an opening for players content with a draw. It is the choice of World Champions like Fischer, Tal, Spassky and Kasparov, and modern stars such as Hikaru Nakamura and Teimour Radjabov, who wanted to fight for the initiative as Black from the very first moves. Its logic is deliberately provocative: Black concedes the center, lets White build it, and stakes everything on dynamic counterplay. That fighting spirit has a precise face in this repertoire. In the Classical main line, GM Aydin Suleymanli does not steer into the most heavily analyzed channels — he reaches for 7...Bg4, a rare idea in which Black is perfectly content to give up the light-squared bishop for White's knight. It is the King's Indian bargain in miniature: trade a small concession for clarity and activity, then play for the win.