Courses (71)

For decades the London System has carried a reputation for being quiet, safe, and a touch boring — a system you reach for when you want a calm game rather than a fight. GM Alexey Dreev opens this course by dismantling that idea from forty years of personal experience. The London, he argues, is far more unpleasant to face than its tame image suggests. Black has many setups that equalize on paper, yet in nearly all of them he is left untangling small, irritating practical problems move after move. That gap between reputation and reality is the thread running through Part 1, and the goal is stated plainly: by the end, you are the one posing the problems.

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.

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.

In 1931, Max Euwe and José Raúl Capablanca reached a position where Black had just sacrificed the exchange on a8. Capablanca, with the black pieces, stood better — and never realised it, repeating moves into a draw he should have been pressing to win. Nearly a century later, that same position is the critical theoretical battleground of this repertoire. White's most testing engine moves still lead straight back to it, and Black is still playing for three results. That is the spirit of the whole course: principled, fighting, and built on lines that reward the player who understands them.

Few openings announce their intentions as openly as the Exchange Slav. After 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.cxd5 cxd5, White releases the central tension and accepts a symmetrical pawn structure. For most of its history this has been read as a peace offering: trade early, simplify, and steer toward a dry position where Black's best case is half a point. Exchange Slav for Black — Top-Level Repertoire sets out to overturn that reading. Its premise, in GM Vladimir Malakhov's words, is that symmetry is not the same as a quiet life — Black can answer every White setup with positions that keep real winning chances on the board.

For most of its history, the London System was the opening you reached for when you wanted a quiet life. Baadur Jobava changed the question. By slipping the knight to c3 before the bishop appears — 1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bf4 — he kept everything that made the London easy to learn and added what the classical version never had: a direct route to creating attacking chances. The early Nc3 unlocks the thematic Nb5 jump against the weak c7-square and clears the way for the Qd2–Bh6 plan against the fianchetto. That is the idea running through this repertoire from start to finish — the London, rebuilt as an attacking system.

When IM Filip Pancevski took up the King's Indian Defence at age 12, he couldn't have imagined he'd still be wielding it more than two decades later—through database explosions, engine revolutions, and countless theoretical novelties. Yet here we are. The KID has survived every computational assault not because the positions are "objectively equal" (they often aren't), but because the resulting chaos favors the player who understands the ideas over the one who memorizes computer lines.

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.

GM Alvar Alonso presents a complete White repertoire against the Caro-Kann Advance, built around 4.c4 and the early c2-c3 lines rather than the heavily analysed mainlines. The repertoire steers play into familiar d4–e5 versus d5–e6 pawn structures, giving White a flexible weapon where structural understanding does most of the work and memorisation is reduced to a minimum.

The Petroff Defense has become the ultimate drawing weapon at the elite level. Carlsen, Caruana, Nepomniachtchi, Giri—all deploy it as their primary answer to 1.e4, steering opponents into symmetrical endgames where White's advantage evaporates by move 15. For ambitious 1.e4 players, facing the Petroff has felt like walking into a theoretical wall: sound preparation meets sound defense, and the result is predictable balance. GM Jose Martinez Alcantara and GM Pier Luigi Basso offer a different approach. Their new course, Fight the Petroff Defense - White Repertoire, builds an aggressive, concrete system based on 5.d4 followed by 6.Bd3—the classical development that keeps the center open and maintains practical tension. Rather than aiming for marginal edges in lifeless structures, this repertoire targets specific imbalances in each of Black's setups. The key move 8.Nbd2 forces Black into immediate concrete decisions, and every resulting position comes with a clear plan.