For most of its history, 3.exd5 has been the move you play when you are happy to shake hands. Symmetrical pawn structure, an open centre, nothing structural to fight over — the Exchange French earned a reputation as the most peaceful reply to the French, the line you reach for on a tired afternoon. So it means something that one of the most inventive attacking players of his generation has built a serious repertoire with real winning chances.
In The Exchange French — Top-Level Repertoire for White, GM Baadur Jobava and GM Pier Luigi Basso set out to dismantle that cliché. The symmetry, they argue, is deceptive: beneath it lies a structure full of small, durable imbalances, and the better-prepared side can lean on them until they decide the game. This is the Exchange French as a fighting choice, not a truce.
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2h 21m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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The Open Sicilian has never really been a single opening. It is a dozen separate wars — the Najdorf, the Dragon, the Sveshnikov, the Taimanov — each with its own theory, its own tabiyas, its own library of grandmaster games. What ties them together in the hands of GM Pier Luigi Basso is one instruction, repeated from the opening moves of every system: go for the attack, period.
That sentence is the foundation of this course. Where most Open Sicilian repertoires ask you to memorize seven different philosophies, the Open Sicilian Express asks you to absorb one — and then shows you the concrete form it takes in each system: the Be3-and-g4 pawn storm against the Taimanov, the Yugoslav Attack against the Dragon, the immediate 7.Nd5 against the Sveshnikov, the modern f4-and-Nb3 plan against the Najdorf.
Sequence: Jospem versus the Sicilian »
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1h 50m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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This course is the next step in our series offering a complete 1.e4 e5 repertoire for Black, following two related projects: Italian Game for Black — Deep Understanding and The Spanish Arkhangelsk with Early ...Bc5 — Deep Understanding. With the Scotch Game, the series now completes one of the most important parts of the 1.e4 e5 universe.
For many players, the Scotch is one of the most unpleasant openings to face. It often leads to irrational positions, where standard plans do not apply and concrete understanding becomes critical — exactly the type of position where preparation based on memorisation breaks down. This course offers a solution built on deep understanding of the arising structures, plans, and practical decisions.
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10.5h PGN Download
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?
Sequence: Exchange Caro-Kann According to Muradli »
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4h 9m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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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.
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1h 49m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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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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.
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1h 33m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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.
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5h 8m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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