Six Videos, Seven Openings: Who Pays for the London System

Late last month I was reviewing an online rapid game from my flat in Dublin at two in the morning, which is seven in the morning in Dhaka. The moves ran like this: 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Bf4 e6 4.e3 c5 5.c3 Nc6 6.Nbd2 Bd6 7.Bg3 O-O 8.Bd3 b6. By move fourteen Black looked tidy, almost comfortable. On move fifteen came White's Ne5, and inside ten more moves the position collapsed. The accuracy readout said 78 for White, 61 for Black. Black had not fallen into a trap. Black had lost because he had no plan to stand on. I laid the board out, and the pattern had been waiting.

That same week ChessBase released the thirty-second instalment of its Tips for Beginners series, titled Training with style. The presenter is International Master Valeri Lilov of Bulgaria. The promise is clean and simple: what should Black do when White declines to play 2.c4 after 1.d4 d5. Seven opening systems, six videos, one plan each.

Start with the arithmetic, because I no longer write a claim without a number beside it. Six videos, seven systems, one plan per system. Not one of the seven receives even a full video's worth of attention. That fraction is the whole character of the product.

Context: why White abandons 2.c4

You have to understand the escape route. 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 is the Orthodox Queen's Gambit Declined. Beside it sit the Slav after 2...c6, the Semi-Slav with...c6 and...e6, and the Queen's Gambit Accepted after 2...dxc4. Behind each lies decades of research, thousands of database games, and grandmaster-level repertoires. A club player who cannot keep that ledger open takes the easy road: the London, the Colle, the Torre, the Trompowsky, the Richter-Veresov, the Blackmar-Diemer.

These were once the refuge of weaker players. That is no longer true. The London System (1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Bf4) has moved into the 2700 band; Jobava lines,...c5 and...Qb6 setups,...e6/...Bd6 structures, and transpositions into the Slav and Caro-Kann have built it a theory mountain of its own. The Trompowsky (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5) and the Richter-Veresov (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bg5) are online rapid and blitz gotcha weapons, rare at elite tables but constant online. The underlying problem is real and it is growing. That is this content's strongest hidden asset.

In 2026 I spent four months building a ledger of Bangladeshi chess: norm tournaments, federation grants, school-pipeline entries. The arithmetic was blunt. Five grandmasters in total, none since Enamul Hossain Razib in 2026, against India's eighty-plus. The Bangladesh Chess Federation's annual government grant came to roughly 1.1 million taka, less than one franchise cricketer's bat sponsorship. The lament was loud; the ledger was quiet; the ledger won. Since then I do not write a decline story without a denominator, and I do not believe a product claim without one either.

Core analysis: the seven are not seven

The list itself is where the cracks show.

The first crack: the Catalan is not a sideline. 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 is a 2.c4 mainline, a fixture of World Championship preparation. The very systems White chooses in order to avoid 2.c4 now sit in the same package as the thing he was trying to avoid. This is not seven equal jobs. It is four club systems, one elite mainline, and two online gotcha weapons.

The second crack: the move orders do not match. The Trompowsky, the Richter-Veresov and the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit all arrive through 1...Nf6 or 2.e4, with 1...d5 appearing later. Yet the framing question is what Black does after 1.d4 d5. Mixing two different questions into one package does not give a student a map, it gives a list.

The third crack: the difficulty asymmetry is hidden. The Colle (1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3) can be handled at club level with standard plans. The Catalan demands long strategic calculation and a large body of forced-line theory. Placing them under one plan-per-opening umbrella is a tactical simplification, and in marketing language it is a distortion.

The fourth crack: the presence of the Blackmar-Diemer tells you this is refutation practice, not repertoire building. After 1.d4 d5 2.e4 dxe4 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.f3, the gambit is regarded as insufficient for White against accurate defence at master level. A Black-side treatment means how to consolidate the extra pawn, not how to discover a new system.

The fifth and most important crack: whose burden is it. When White picks a risk-free sideline after 1.d4 d5, he is playing for a small, pressure-free edge. The accuracy burden sits with Black, who must both equalise and avoid drifting into passive structures. Selling help for Black means selling the harder half of the equation. The promotional copy never admits that asymmetry, and that omission is larger than any list error.

Contrarian angle: the value is in the structure, not the moves

First, the expectation gap. When the copy says Black has to be prepared for each of these openings and then offers six videos, a buyer hears the word prepared. One plan is not a repertoire. In team-sport language, this is squad depth, not a starting eleven.

Second, shelf life is uneven. Colle, Torre and Blackmar-Diemer will sit almost unchanged for years. The London will not. London theory is the fastest-moving of the set because it is the most played. A package sold as uniform, whose parts decay at different rates, sends the buyer's value calculation in the wrong direction.

Third, a reverse feedback loop is running. The more Black-side answers get published, the more club players feel safe answering 1.d4 with 1...d5, and the more popular the London, Colle and Torre become. This niche is not saturating; it manufactures its own demand.

Fourth, the competition is free. Streamer content, YouTube, platform courses cover the same systems at zero marginal cost. So what is actually being sold? Curation, sequencing, production, and integration with a database ecosystem. That is precisely where the defence lies: plan-based teaching outlives line-based repertoires by years. Theory changes; the idea does not. The format decision is strategically sound even where the execution is thin.

One more admission. Empty stadiums in 2026 taught me which noises were ever real. That August I was covering online chess at two in the morning and saving blitz games from a ten-year-old Dhaka account whose endgame technique sat far above its rating. Four years later that account belonged to Manon Reja Neer. A ten-year-old showed me where my model had gone lazy. The lesson holds here: to find talent you must keep the pipeline ledger, and to find a system you must keep the structural one.

Takeaway

ChessBase´26 is ambiguous as written, whether it denotes a software version, an annual package or a subscription tier, and that should be verified. Over the next six months I will watch three things: whether the London's appearance rate rises in elite classical round-robins, whether the series rotates its authors or rests 32 instalments on one IM's shoulders, and whether the London segment alone receives a versioned update. Whatever is not updated will be what ages first.

Laid out on the board, the question is not whether seven openings are being taught. The question is which burden the buyer is being asked to pay for, and which burden is being quietly shifted onto Black's shoulders.