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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2h 10m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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.
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5h 42m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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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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4h 3m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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A repertoire built on staying in your own territory
The Rossolimo begins 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5, and Cheparinov's recommendations consistently favour low-risk, low-theory lines that still pose real problems.
Against the main 3...g6 he castles first and inserts 5.Re1, waiting for ...e5 before committing the structure. Against 3...e6 he chooses the immediate 4.Bxc6, then d3 and the rare 6.b3 — placing the bishop on b2 and preparing f4 in a line that has almost no games but plenty of venom.
The headline is that 7.a4 in the 3...g6, 5...e5 main line: queenside space, a fixed pawn target, and the plan Na3–c4 striking at both the e5-pawn and the dark squares. It is new, principled, and stress-tested at elite level by the author himself.
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3h 16m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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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.
Sequence: Dreev's London »
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4h 52m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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"A knight on the rim is dim." Few maxims are drilled into beginners more often — and few are refuted more elegantly than by 7...Na6 in the Classical King's Indian. The knight steps to the edge not to linger there, but to spring into c5, where it pressures e4 while Black's central counterplay gathers force.
That paradox runs through the whole of Part 4. Instead of the dense, move-for-move theory demanded by 7...Nc6 or 7...Nbd7, Black gets a repertoire organized around recurring ideas: the ...Na6–c5 route, the flexible ...Qe7, reinforcing e5 while keeping all options open, and the thematic ...Ng4 and ...f5 breaks. The same plans reappear against almost everything White tries, so understanding carries the load rather than memorization.
Sequence: King's Indian Defense According to Jobava »
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5h 20m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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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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2h 28m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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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2h 14m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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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1h 48m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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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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