Six Videos, One Dangling Quote, and the Price of Chess

Six Videos, One Dangling Quote, and the Price of Chess

Tuesday evening, seven boards, one clock. On the third floor of a St Petersburg club, beside a radiator, a boy's hand hovers over a knight. White has played 1.d4, then 2.Nf3, 3.Bf4 — the London System. He does not know where the knight goes, and his clock is already eight minutes down. He knows the moves by heart; he does not know the plan. That gap is exactly where a market looks.

I have watched this game for thirty-nine years — sometimes from a press box, sometimes from behind a microphone, sometimes from a St Petersburg kitchen with a laptop and a chat window scrolling faster than I could read. One thing I have learned: where a player hesitates on the board, a product is born.

This past week my inbox delivered exactly that product — six videos by the Bulgarian trainer IM Valeri Lilov, marketed to Black players as an antidote to White's so-called system openings. Above them sits a sentence: “Chess is massively undervalued.” The line is attributed to someone named Turlov.

Two questions follow immediately. What does that quote actually have to do with the six videos? And if chess is undervalued, on whose ledger, and in whose currency?

The board remembers what the camera missed — the pitch remembers what the camera missed. That sentence is the whole of my working life.

What Arrived, and What Is Being Sold

What arrived is not a news report and not a competitive analysis. It is a product page. A quote attributed to Turlov in the headline; six instructional videos in the body. Two things from two different sources, glued together with no connecting argument. That is the first red flag.

What is being sold is a Black-side preparation package against White's system openings: the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the London System, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, and the Richter-Veresov Opening. But there are six videos and seven names. A small discrepancy, and not a cheap one — because it tells you how the package was assembled.

The marketing language is blunt: these systems are “extremely dangerous.” The evidence offered is “the painful experience of many chess players.” Which players, how many games, at which rating band — nothing is said. That sentence is the foundation of the whole package, and it is the weakest foundation of all.

The background matters. Chess's boom since 2026 is common knowledge — lockdown, The Queen's Gambit, the Online Olympiad, streaming culture. That boom produced two different things: new players, and new buyers. The economy built around the second group is the real story here, and Lilov's six videos are a sample of it.

Openings, Classes, and the Real Danger

A definition first. “System” openings are White's setups that decline to play 2.c4 — the ones that sidestep the main-line theory of the Slav, Semi-Slav, Queen's Gambit Accepted, and Orthodox Queen's Gambit Declined. That avoidance is the whole attraction.

Here lies the package's technical imprecision. The Colle, London, and Torre usually arise after 1.d4 d5. The Trompowsky, Richter-Veresov, and Catalan usually arise after 1.d4 Nf6. Lumping them into one family is a simplification. More importantly, the Catalan is not a low-theory crouch at all — it is a main-line system beginning 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3, whose fianchettoed bishop and central bind survive at elite level. Putting the Catalan inside an anti-system package is a tell: this material was repackaged from a broader course library, not built from fresh research.

The only member of this set with genuine elite relevance is the London System, deployed at the top level in recent years as a low-risk weapon — and plausibly the commercial catalyst for anti-London products like this one. The rest — Colle, Torre, Blackmar-Diemer — are club weapons or surprise tools. The Blackmar-Diemer is a sharp gambit in which White gives a pawn for rapid development.

Here the danger claim shows its limit. The genuine danger of these systems sits in the 1500–2200 club band, where opponents are underprepared. At elite level, a well-prepared Black player is broadly comfortable against them. “Extremely dangerous” is marketing hyperbole, not technical fact.

And the data side is empty. No engine match rate, no ACPL, no win or draw rates, no sample games. For a preparation product, those are precisely the numbers that should exist. Their absence is itself information.

The trainer's profile belongs in a separate frame. IM Valeri Lilov matters here as a trainer and content creator, not as a competitor. His authority rests on instructional reputation and the IM title, not on current tournament results. That is not a weakness, but it should be said plainly: this is an appeal to experience, not an argument.

Where the Real Market Sits

Read this only as a product review and you miss the signal. The signal is the productization of the niche repertoire — anti-London, anti-Trompowsky, anti-Colle. In the education market this is a low-risk, high-margin model: no theoretical research cost, no competitive liability, just a targeted buyer segment.

This is where the Moscow mirror helps, and not as exoticism — two systems held side by side. In Russia, chess is a profession: salaries, schools, coaches, a state structure. In Bangladesh, the federation runs on roughly Tk 11 lakh a year. A video series lives above that Tk 11 lakh structure, because videos sell to individuals while federations build pipelines. Same game, different economy. One cricket comparison, and only about money and infrastructure: a single franchise cricketer's bat deal exceeds the federation's annual budget.

I should say where I stand. In 2026, at the FIDE World Cup in Tbilisi, there was no studio and no producer — a headset, a laptop, and a chat window scrolling faster than I could read. A 128-player, 25-day knockout, with a deadline every four seconds. When Levon Aronian broke Ding Liren in the rapid tiebreak, I was explaining to a schoolteacher in Khulna why a king cannot be captured.

In 2026 I got two crowds in one year. In June my own city hosted the football World Cup — eleven cities, fan zones, 80,000-seat stadiums. In September I flew to the 43rd Chess Olympiad in Batumi, where China took gold in both the open and women's events, the first federation to sweep both since the Soviet era. More than 180 federations, and almost no cameras. Bangladesh sent a five-board open team and a women's team still leaning on Rani Hamid, then in her mid-seventies. I wrote one essay about both pitches.

In 2026 every arena emptied. In August I called the FIDE Online Olympiad from my St Petersburg kitchen — an India–Russia final that ended not with checkmate but with a disconnection, both teams declared joint gold. In Dhaka the Premier Division Chess League went dark, and players with day jobs stopped receiving match fees. I spent July interviewing them about rent.

That experience is why the word “undervalued” hangs loose for me. Undervalued against what? Since 2026, chess's audiences, buyers, and streams have all grown. Chess used to be cheap; it is not cheap now. The sentence placed above six videos is largely a decontextualized promotional line whose job is to lend prestige to a product.

The Ledger Nobody Is Writing

Everyone will read this piece one of two ways — as a product review, or as a “chess is undervalued” slogan. Both are the wrong direction.

First, the real fact is that the low-theory opening wave is now large enough to sustain dedicated products against it. That is not a signal of competitive strength or weakness; it is a demand signal — the club population playing White has drifted toward low-theory setups, and the education market is converting that drift into revenue.

Second, the title–body mismatch. The Turlov quote and the Lilov product arrived from separate streams and were glued together without a bridge. The gluing is the news: chess content now passes through aggregation, and a respected name is often torn from its context and pasted on as product veneer. Who Turlov is, where the quote came from, in which interview, on what date — until that is checked against a primary source, the quote's industry significance is zero.

Third, a blind spot of collective memory. We count the boom's players; we do not count the boom's salesmen. A large layer of chess's new economy is now courses, subscriptions, and affiliate placement — and that layer shapes which openings get taught and which do not. A market that sells courses does not steer the game, but it decides a great deal about what counts as important.

Fourth, the market of fear. “Your opponent's favourite systems are secretly dangerous” manufactures anxiety, then sells the fix. The education market's core product is anxiety. And the system is not the problem: a player who memorizes six answers to six systems cannot answer the seventh — that is the real pedagogical risk, pattern-memorization against understanding.

Fifth, the most uncomfortable point. The money that buys a video does not build a coach. The money that buys an anti-London course does not build a school pipeline. The education market sells individual improvement; the federation sells the next generation. Bangladesh's story is largely the story of the second ledger — seventeen years without a sixth grandmaster, a federation on Tk 11 lakh a year, parents choosing engineering over the board. That is not cultural betrayal; it is a rational economic decision.

Closing the Ledger

Three signals I am logging. One: if elite use of the London System continues, the low-theory wave becomes more durable. Two: if niche anti-system courses keep launching on platforms like Chessable, that confirms a permanent market segment. Three: the identity of Turlov and the origin of the quote. None of the three is confirmed yet.

Beneath that sits a human question no video file contains. The fourteen-year-old who won the national title undefeated — who feeds him, who coaches him, and if he is lost at twenty-two, on whose ledger will that be written? Six videos were never a pipeline. They were a subscription.

The board is still writing, and it has not stopped — the board is the only witness that never stopped recording. Two pitches, one year, and the quiet math of belonging. I leave the question to the reader: next time you buy the video, will you ask once — who is being built by this money, and who is not?