The Move 9...a5 and the Promise of 'No Memorisation': An Unverified Antidote

On a Saturday, after the last games at a small chess club on Nguyen Thien Thuat Street had ended, only one man stayed behind at table four. He was about sixty. In front of him lay an unfinished position: the white b-pawn had advanced to b4, the black knight still sat on f6, the black bishop on g7, both kings already castled. He wrote nothing down. He pushed his a-pawn from a7 to a5 – then sat still for a long time, both palms flat on the edge of the table, as if waiting for the position to speak to him.

I was at the next table and asked what he was thinking. He said: “I am wondering whether this move is really mine, or whether it is the move somebody sold me.” He had just bought an instructional chess DVD – the kind of product the chess world calls an antidote. The pitch was compact: play 9...a5 against the Bayonet Attack as Black and you escape the forcing lines, you do not need to memorise, you only need to understand the position. He had given forty years to the board, and he wanted to know whether the promise held.

To answer him, one has to go back to an opening that has lived for nearly a century. The King’s Indian Defence begins 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6. Black deliberately concedes the centre early, builds the bishop on g7, and only then strikes back with ...e5. The Mar del Plata variation – the sharpest branch of this system – takes shape when Black develops the knight to c6 and pushes ...e5, and White answers 8.d5, driving the knight back to e7. The name comes from the 2026 Candidates Tournament in the Argentine city of Mar del Plata, where a cluster of games in this line shaped its theory. In the ECO classification, the branch sits around E97–E99.

For decades, Mar del Plata was a classic two-wing race: White pushes queenside pawns, Black pushes kingside pawns, both sides run at the enemy king, and the first to arrive wins. In the early 1990s, a White plan rose to fashion: 9.b4, the Bayonet Attack. The pawn advances to b4 to gain queenside space and threaten b5, driving the black knight off c6 – the piece that anchors Black’s counterplay. From then on, anyone playing the black side of this system needed a ready answer to 9.b4.

The orthodox answer is 9...Nh5. The knight hops to the rim, preparing ...f5, tearing the kingside open, accepting a chaotic fight with lines a dozen moves deep where one slip ends the game. That is fertile ground for a small but durable market: the market that sells answers. For years, opening DVDs, online courses and paid databases have lived on a single promise – that the buyer will own a weapon without spending three months reading through thousands of games.

That market is not large, but it is surprisingly stable. An opening DVD does not need a million buyers; it needs a few thousand serious players to break even, and one author with credibility in one specific branch. Production costs are low, the product life is long, the content can be reused across formats. While most sports chase television contracts and shirt sponsors, chess makes a living by selling knowledge to exactly the people who understand its value.

The DVD the man at the club bought is not an invention. 9...a5 has long been in the books: Black does not open the kingside immediately, but pushes a flank pawn to challenge White’s own b4-pawn, forcing White to decide whether to hold or change the pawn structure. The position then turns closed, both sides manoeuvre in silence, and the result comes from move twenty-five or thirty rather than a strike on move twelve. It is a secondary branch. The main branch remains 9...Nh5, and that detail matters, because the whole commercial value of the product lies in it positioning itself as something other than the main branch.

The pitch is built on a clear contrast. On one side, 9...Nh5: it opens the position, forces the lines, and makes computer analysis important again. On the other, 9...a5: it leads to sound positions with very few concrete lines, aimed at players who want to think for themselves instead of sitting down to memorise. That is a psychological argument, not a theoretical one. It targets a specific segment: club players without eight hours a day for memorisation, who feel left behind in an era where an opponent only has to open a database to have every answer ready.

The key point sits here: the product does not sell theoretical superiority, it sells practical steerability. The claim that “chances are equal” is a positional statement, not a claim of novelty. And for such a statement to stand, at least one form of evidence is needed: a sample game, a win-draw rate from a database, an engine evaluation, or at minimum the presenter’s name with a record in this branch. The promotional text I read contained none of that. No sample game. No statistics. No name.

In the years I have spent staying behind after domestic tournaments and club games, one pattern keeps repeating: people who buy this kind of product rarely buy because they believe a statistic. They buy because they believe in the feeling of being freed. The man at the club did not need a theoretically perfect branch. He needed a position in which, after leaving the board, he would not feel he had just lost for lack of memory. That need is real, and the market understands it perfectly. But real does not mean the promise is correct.

Technically, 9...a5 has a weakness built into the way it is sold. The branch has fewer forcing lines, but it does not have less calculation. White has several ways to handle the pawn structure, and each leads to a different kind of position – sometimes White pushes b5, sometimes White trades on a5 and opens a file, sometimes White switches to the kingside. Black in this branch is not released from calculation; Black simply changes the type of calculation. A player with good positional foundations gets a bargain. A player weak in positional play gets a new trap, different from the old one only in that it arrives later and is harder to notice.

It is worth pausing on how the product advertises itself, because that reveals its place in the wider picture. In an era when most elite players have moved away from the King’s Indian Mar del Plata, because it consumes too much calculation for an uncertain result, a DVD about a secondary branch of that system is not aimed at grandmasters. It is aimed at club-level players, where a well-prepared weapon can still win three games in a weekend tournament. At that level the product’s value is real. It is only that the real value is not where the pitch places it.

Here the text contains a sentence that deserves to be lifted out, because it is the most misleading: the idea that computers often do not know how to handle these complex strategic positions. That belongs to a past era – the period before neural-network engines, when machines evaluated positions by counting material and searching deeper. In that period, closed positions with few forcing lines and long-term factors really were a blind spot.

Today’s engines are different. They judge long-term positions better than most grandmasters and need no forcing line to see the value of a pawn structure. A secondary branch does not remove calculation – it changes the type of calculation, and the real limit sits with the learner, not the machine. The argument that “the machine does not understand” has expired, yet it survives as a selling point, because it hits a strong emotion: the feeling that humans still hold a territory machines cannot touch.

That territory no longer exists in the sense the pitch intends. What remains is a humbler truth: most club players lack the time and skill to extract everything the engine shows. Confusing the two is dangerous, because it lets a player believe he holds a technological edge when in fact he holds a position his opponent has analysed more carefully.

Another point should be said plainly: 9...a5 is not an invention but a known branch. That does not make it worthless, but it raises a question about durability. An antidote is valuable only until the other side finds an antidote to it. In chess that cycle runs faster than people expect: a branch is widely sold, a rebuttal appears within months, and within a year it becomes a line any seriously prepared player must know. By then the DVD buyer no longer holds a surprise; he holds only the hardest part of the position, the part that is not in the DVD.

And one detail made me stop while reading the material about this product. The title of the document I received referred to a team-event round in Samarkand, Uzbekistan – where the leading teams all won despite close calls. The entire body, however, was a promotion for an opening DVD. The two have nothing to do with each other. That is a source-splicing error, and for anyone who works with words it is a red flag: when a document contradicts itself at the most basic level of information, every claim inside it must be re-verified from the original source.

Back at the club on Nguyen Thien Thuat Street. The sixty-year-old man finally stood up, packed the pieces away, and said nothing more about the DVD. I thought about the empty stand of chess – a stand with nobody in it, but one that still echoes, if we are quiet enough to listen. That echo is not the seller’s pitch. It is the voice of people who have played for forty years and still want to learn one new move without being persuaded that something is missing from them.

The real death of a golden generation is the moment we stop remembering it. In chess, generations do not die for lack of talent; they die when honest answers stop being handed down – including the limits of those answers. Generations will pass, but the poem about them keeps being written, and that poem is only trustworthy when it is written with the truth.

If you are holding the black pieces in the Mar del Plata and considering 9...a5, the thing worth weighing is not whether the move is strong. The thing worth weighing is whether, after it lands, you understand the position well enough to continue alone. If yes, the DVD is only a starting point, and every starting point has a right to be bought. If not, no secondary branch on earth will calculate moves twenty-five and thirty for you.