Seven Openings, Six Videos, One Plan: Black's Uneven Ledger in the Age of the London System

I begin with a count, because without the count this piece has no reason to exist.

ChessBase has published "ChessBase´26 – Tips for Beginners, part 32: Training with style" on its own channel. Thirty-second instalment of the series. Six video lessons inside. And across those videos the openings to be discussed make a list of seven names: the London System, the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov Opening.

Seven, and six. The difference is one. The whole story of this product sits inside that difference.

Last week around one in the morning I was watching an online rapid game. A club player in Dhaka, playing Black. White played 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Bf4. The London System. Black had four minutes on the clock. He owns Semi-Slav lines, Orthodox Queen's Gambit Declined lines, prepared answers against the Catalan. None of them apply. White never entered that theory. White wanted exactly this — no theory, no risk, just a structure and a seat.

I began tagging, and the tags began to sort themselves. The promotional copy contains no moves, no engine evaluations, no game references. Seven opening names, a promise of one plan per opening, and an author credited as an International Master — the Bulgarian trainer Valeri Lilov. No rating, no competitive results, no student outcomes.

I attach a conditions log to every report: platform, time control, latency, hour of play. So, here. Platform: the publisher's own channel, which makes the product description reliable and the evaluative claims structurally biased. Time control: the videos have none, so transfer to rapid or blitz is untested. And one small ambiguity remains in the title — "ChessBase´26" could denote a software version, an annual content package, or a subscription tier; the source does not settle it.

Why White refuses to play 2.c4 — and how that refusal built a market

When White plays 2.c4, he walks voluntarily into the enormous theory of the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen's Gambit Accepted and the Orthodox QGD. Across those four families the accumulated lines are not learnable by an individual. They are organisational work, database work, team-preparation work. A player with six study hours a week does not want to walk through that door.

So he takes another route. 3.Bf4, the London. 3.e3, the Colle. 2.Bg5, the Trompowsky. 2.Nf3 followed quickly by 3.Bg5, the Torre. 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3, the Catalan. 2.e4, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit. 2.Nc3 with 3.Bg5, the Richter-Veresov.

Notice that this list was not assembled in one place. The Trompowsky, the Richter-Veresov and the Catalan arrive through 1...Nf6, not 1...d5. At least three of the promised seven come down entirely different move orders. A reader who believes he is learning seven openings is in fact learning branches of three separate opening trees.

The engine behind this market is not the club circuit. It is the platform. In online blitz and rapid these systems appear so often that without a fixed answer, rating bleeds. Streamer popularity and platform culture together moved the London from a dismissed amateur safety net into a legitimate elite weapon. The Jobava London, the ...c5/...Qb6 structures, the ...e6/...Bd6 setups, transpositions into Slav and Caro-Kann complexes — all of it is now part of serious preparation.

And that is exactly where Black-side supply appears. At the top sit general manager-authored, line-by-line repertoire databases. At the bottom sit streamers and platform content at zero marginal cost. Between those tiers sits the publisher's serialised beginner series — cheap to produce, high frequency, and functioning as a subscription-retention layer.

Seven systems in one box: whose burden is how heavy

The flatness of the list is where my objection lives. The actual burden is not flat. From years of watching one board at a time, I can say that opening preparation never distributes weight evenly, and a product that presents it as even distorts the reader's mental model before the first video loads.

The Catalan is this list's largest category error. 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 is itself a mainline system, a daily instrument of world championship preparation, where long-term queenside pressure from a fianchettoed bishop is built across years. Placing it beside the Colle and calling it one of seven equal plans pushes a season's worth of work into a six-video box. An IM teaching a beginner the Colle is entirely normal. The Catalan module is a different class of task.

The London is the most valuable item here, and one video cannot finish it. The London now has its own mountain — which ...Qb6 pressure belongs to which pawn structure, which ...Ne4 trade opens which file, when ...c5 justifies transposing into a Slav. A club-level scaffold is achievable in one plan video. At 2026-plus it is temporary comfort.

The Trompowsky and the Torre sit in between. The Trompowsky's idea is simple — White develops a bishop early and skips mainline structures — but without Black's specific, almost punitive answer (...Ne4, ...d5, ...c5 timing), White's setup generates pressure on its own. The Torre is quieter and structure-oriented, and the one-plan frame works far better there.

The Colle, the Blackmar-Diemer and the Richter-Veresov carry the lightest burden, each for a different reason. The Colle is stable, its theory frozen, still valid in five years. The Richter-Veresov is a gotcha weapon that appears far more often online than at elite over-the-board level — its inclusion tells you the target reader is an online rapid player. And the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, 1.d4 d5 2.e4 dxe4 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.f3, is objectively regarded as insufficient for White against accurate defence at master level. Handling it as Black is consolidation study, not strategy building.

White is "not ambitious" does not mean Black is comfortable

Here is the sentence the promotional copy leaves out. After 1.d4 d5, when White chooses a risk-free sideline, he is playing for a small, pressure-free edge. He carries no real risk of losing and no burden of accuracy. The person carrying the accuracy burden is Black.

Black has two jobs at once: equalise, and avoid drifting into a passive structure while equalising. On the queenside of a London, the wrong order of ...c5 and ...Qb6 closes your own position. The asymmetry is absent from the copy. A club player who reads "White is not very ambitious" and concludes the board favours him will reach precisely the wrong conclusion.

Six videos, seven systems — the arithmetic is plain. Either two systems share one video, or one is treated as an aside. Either way the density is thin, especially for openings as branchy as the London and the Catalan.

What is absent matters too. No repertoire database. No annotated model games. No testing or quiz component. The deliverable is demonstrative video plans and nothing more.

Execution blind spots: teaching half of Black's job is teaching the easy half

The real risk here is not technical error. It is expectation mismatch. "Black has to be prepared for each of these openings" followed immediately by a six-video offer reads as a claim of sufficiency. In practice the London and Catalan brackets demand ongoing study while the other four are near-static. A product that implies uniform shelf life has non-uniform shelf life.

There is also a self-reinforcing loop worth naming. The more Black-side answers are published, the more visible these systems become, and the more visible they become, the more White players adopt them. Black-side products generate part of their own demand. This is a self-reinforcing niche, not a saturating one.

A second self-defeating premise: the promise of escaping theory that draws White into the London is only half true. The London's own theory has grown so large that White's gain is often a change of theoretical address rather than an exit from theory. If Black plays a widely published plan, the argument does not end; it changes tables.

A thirty-second instalment is itself a signal. A running order that long implies low marginal information per release, with value accruing through brand habit. For a beginner there is a side effect: he accumulates six anti-systems without improving calculation or endgame fundamentals. Supply-heavy opening culture does not belong to this series alone, but a series this long feeds it.

The competitive position is uncomfortably honest: almost everything being sold is available free elsewhere. So what is being paid for? Curation, sequencing, production quality, and integration with the publisher's own tool ecosystem. One title, one recurring IM author — in that format the series' perceived quality becomes a function of one person's consistency, while GM-authored alternatives hold the higher-price tier.

One board, eleven reports: I stopped looking for truth and started mapping angles. At the 44th Olympiad in Mahabalipuram in 2026 that is exactly what I did — instead of the medal story I filed ten daily board reports on a sixteen-year-old D. Gukesh playing board one for India-2, who scored 8/11. What those reports taught me is that a system's strength is not in its name but in who sits at the table. The London is the same. In a grandmaster's hands it is not an amateur safety net. It is a weapon.

Missing data, present questions

The absent list is not short either. No author rating. No game references, no engine evaluations, no success rates. Bulgaria's training lineage is a soft credibility signal, not evidence. An IM byline is appropriate for a beginner series; it is a thin warrant for a Catalan module. For a buyer rated 2200-plus, that module is orientation, not repertoire.

I trust the spreadsheet only after it survives a cold, rainy match. Here the spreadsheet does not survive, because the table is empty. Seven names are placed side by side while the hours required, the depth required and the shelf life of each are all different.

Takeaway: what to measure, when measuring matters

Looking forward, I am watching three indicators. One, the London's usage rate at elite level — if it climbs steadily, the phenomenon is structural rather than a club fashion. Two, whether a materially new Black-side London setup appears at the top; if it does, the London module of products like this gets a shorter life. Three, whether the publisher rotates to GM authors or introduces difficulty bands — that would signal a brand upgrade. Alongside those, watch free-substitute pricing and the progress of AI-assisted preparation tools.

From Mumbai I see two boards side by side. India has more grandmasters than can be counted on two hands, a junior pipeline producing norms, a coaching ladder, and a Premier League that rents foreign GMs to fill top boards. Bangladesh has five — Niaz Murshed in 2026, Ziaur Rahman in 2026, Reefat Bin-Sattar in 2026, Abdullah Al Rakib in 2026, Enamul Hossain Razib in 2026. And then sixteen years without a new grandmaster.

The London epidemic reached Dhaka anyway, because the Dhaka club player handles it in online rapid too. Sixteen-year-old epidemiology does not stop at a border, because the game does not recognise one. What does stop is what stands behind the player: a salaried league, a coaching ladder, or nothing.

The BCF's annual government support is roughly Tk 11 lakh. Standard Chartered's school chess programme ended in 2026. Ziaur Rahman collapsed and died at the board on 5 July 2026 during a Premier Division League match in Dhaka — a fifteen-time national champion, holder of the country's highest rating at 2570, still dependent on prize money to eat. Read those three numbers together and the problem stops looking like talent and starts looking like a calendar.

The empty board was not empty; it was a question with no pieces. These Black-side videos touch one small corner of that question — how to survive in an age of theory avoidance. But in Dhaka or Mumbai, the real question is not on the opening list. It is this: whose name gets written in the next sixteen years, and in which year will the norm tournament that lets that name be written finally sit on home soil?