Courses (257)

We are excited to introduce English Opening – Jobava’s Repertoire, the latest course by GM Baadur Jobava and GM Pier Luigi Basso. This course provides a complete and aggressive repertoire for Black against the English Opening, based on 1.c4 c5.

This course is the final piece in Jobava’s Full Repertoire for Black Against the Closed Openings, following his two highly successful courses:
1) The Ambitious Queen's Gambit Accepted
2) Jobava London Reversed – Top-Level Repertoire for Black
By combining these three courses, you will have a fully structured and practical repertoire against 1.d4, 1.c4, and all Closed Openings, crafted by one of the most creative and aggressive players of our time, GM Baadur Jobava.

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.

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.

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.

Following the success of the 1.d4 According to Dreev series, GM Alexey Dreev and GM Pier Luigi Basso return with a powerful new chapter—Fight the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. This course provides a complete and ambitious repertoire for White after:
1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.e4
This aggressive continuation challenges Black from the very first moves, setting the tone for dynamic and initiative-driven play. Unlike more reserved systems, 3.e4 seizes central space and creates immediate tactical and strategic dilemmas for the opponent.

After a catastrophic 25-move defeat to Smyslov in the 1954 World Championship match, Botvinnik did what he always did: he went home and studied. He emerged with a single quiet king move, 7...Kf8, and uncorked it against Unzicker at the Amsterdam Olympiad that same year. Every modern engine now confirms it as the best continuation in the line — a verdict Botvinnik reached decades early, armed with nothing but a board and the discipline to interrogate his own loss.
That moment is the spine of the fourth and final volume of GM Pier Luigi Basso's Understand the French series, and it points to what this course is really after. The lesson isn't the move — it's the method that produced it. With Rubinstein, Petrosian, and Korchnoi, you could study a player and adopt his repertoire. Botvinnik is loyal to specific systems even when they are dubious, even when they cost him games against Tal, so copying him is not the point. Learning how he thought — and worked — is.

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.

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.

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!

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.