Along the Edge of 1.d4 d5: Lilov's Six Videos, Seven Openings, and Black's Unfinished Plan

The board was on move twenty-three and Black's clock had forty-two seconds left. Across from him sat a sixteen-year-old from the Mymensingh district club who plays the same Colle set-up in almost every online blitz game: d4, Nf3, e3, Bd3, Nbd2, and the c1-bishop lifted to f4. Opposite him, a player rated 2100 who had seen the opening twice, not three times.

I paused the stream and rewound the position six times, working from a PGN file saved on a secondhand laptop. The same picture every time: Black's...c5 break arrived eight moves late, and by then White's e5-square and the open f-file were both padlocked. Black did not lose the opening. Black lost because of one move he did not know and, more importantly, because he had no plan at all.

That gap is what IM Valeri Lilov's Black repertoire course, titled "The Right King Road", promises to fill. The question is not whether to buy it. The question is which pieces of information get lost when a product like this travels to a club player in Bangladesh — and which pieces were never supplied in the first place.

Context: six videos, seven names, one market

Lilov is a Bulgarian International Master and trainer. Against GM-authored courses his credentials are solid but not top-tier. That is the first honest signal: a player above 2400 looking for opening theory is probably not the buyer here. The likely buyer sits between roughly 1400 and 2200 and has no memory hours to spare — though the source never states a target rating band.

The product covers seven openings in six videos: the London System, the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, the Richter-Veresov Attack and the Catalan. The sales line calls these "extremely dangerous" in the hands of White players who avoid mainline 2.c4 theory, and offers as proof "the painful experience of many chess players".

The market is real. The London System's popularity at club and online level has grown enough to create genuine demand for Black-side antidotes. That is not a chess truth; it is a marketing response. But when that response reaches the screens of my club's juniors, three Bangladeshi realities act at once: they have no eight hours a week for preparation; almost none of them hold an international payment card; and the course is in English, while most of the club reads Bangla more comfortably.

The openings that do not fit the frame

The central advertising claim is "1.d4 d5, not the mainline 2.c4". Count strictly and four of the seven fit: the London, the Colle, the Blackmar-Diemer and, with some forcing, the Richter-Veresov. The other three enter through completely different doors — and that inconsistency is the most important information in the repertoire.

The Catalan cannot exist without 2.c4. The normal move order runs 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 4.g3. If White is genuinely avoiding 2.c4, how does he reach a Catalan? The only coherent explanation is that the course makes two contradictory promises at once: a plan for Black against players who avoid 2.c4, plus a separate answer for the players who do play it.

The Trompowsky (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5) and the Torre (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Bg5) fall into the same trap, more subtly. If Black answers 1.d4 with 1...d5, the Trompowsky never appears, because White has no...Nf6 to meet. It arrives only after 1...Nf6. The Torre comes through 1...Nf6 and then...e6.

A player who answers 1.d4 only with 1...d5 will never see three chapters of this course — unless he first changes his opening move. A reasonable inference follows: Lilov's repertoire is not a pure 1...d5 system but a 1...Nf6-based hybrid, mixing...d5 and...e6 according to circumstance. Without the Catalan, Trompowsky and Torre on the board, there is no other way. The source gives no move orders, so this is inference rather than fact — but of the available explanations it fits the most squares.

Six videos, seven openings: how the split probably runs

At least one video must carry two openings. The natural pairing is London and Colle, since both belong to one structural family — d4, Nf3, e3, Bd3 — with the c1-bishop as the main difference. From Black's side the plans converge too:...c5,...Nc6,...Qb6, and stopping White's e4 push.

The Catalan cannot be paired that way. It is a different species: White's g3 bishop, long strategic pressure, slow transformation. A London game reaches a plan inside ten moves; a Catalan asks you to sit for sixty. So one video was probably spent on the Catalan alone, one on the Blackmar-Diemer, one on the Richter-Veresov, one on the Trompowsky, one on the Torre, and the last on the London-Colle pair. That is my estimate, not established fact.

The estimate matters because a buyer who reads seven names and assumes seven full treatments has done the arithmetic wrong. Seven openings in six videos means lower average depth per opening, and that is exactly where the "memory-light" promise shows its ceiling.

What Black actually needs

Against every system opening, Black's first question is one: does White get the central e4 push for free? Knowing the answer to that single question saves a great deal of memorisation.

Against the London, the classical equaliser is...c5,...Nc6,...Qb6, with the queen pressing both b2 and d4, plus a light-squared bishop trade (...Bf5 or...Bg4) so White's Bd3 does not sit unopposed. Another practical idea is...e6 and...Bd6 to remove the f4-bishop; the resulting structure usually gives Black lasting equality.

There is a simple indicator of how much urgency is required: if White cannot arrange e4 without a second preparation move, Black is safe. The London players who can shove d4 forward twice are few, but against them you must be willing to give material back.

Against the Colle the plan is simpler. White's threat is the Bd3 and Qe2 battery followed by e4. Black answers with...c5,...Nc6,...Bd6 and eventually...b5 for queenside space, because the Colle player's c1-bishop often stays out of the game entirely.

Against the Trompowsky there are three families:...Ne4,...e6 and...d5. Which you choose depends on whether you will hand White the bishop pair. The Trompowsky is not a trap; it is a trade offer — White wants the two bishops, Black wants a comfortable structure, and the better Black player takes the structure.

Against the Torre:...e6,...Be7,...h6, and a timely...Ne4 or...c5. The biggest danger is developing the queen too early, because then the Bg5 pin becomes a real shackle. In the Blackmar-Diemer the practical path is 3...Nf6 and returning the pawn to reach a normal game; memorising gambit theory there is a waste of hours. In the Richter-Veresov, 3...Nbd7 or 3...Bf5 followed by...c6 and...Qa5 pressure usually lets Black out comfortably.

The Catalan is a separate calculation. If Black enters a Queen's Gambit-shaped structure with...e6 and...d5, White's g3 and Bg2 generate long-term pressure and the game slides into a slow, grinding transformation. Black's honest plan there is...dxc4,...b5,...Bb7,...Nbd7 and a...c5 break. For anyone raised on three-minute blitz, the Catalan is a different sport.

"Extremely dangerous" — where is the evidence?

My main objection sits here. Proving an opening is dangerous requires three things together: rating-banded scoring data, a measure of move accuracy, and engine comparison. The source provides none of the three — no ACPL, no win rate, no draw rate, not even a sample game. What it provides is the phrase "the painful experience of many chess players".

Experience is not evidence, particularly when the seller prices his product from his customers' pain.

That raises an uglier question. Opening marketing increasingly reaches for numbers — "White scores 56 percent in this variation", "Black's win rate improves in this structure". Where do those numbers come from? Usually from large online databases that do not separate rating bands, where thousands of rapid and blitz games at 2026 level get pooled together. The same figures then travel several steps further into the sports-data market whose end customer has never touched a board. In the specific case of chess preparation I do not treat that trend lightly.

The Bangla-language club reality: price, payment, time

Across eight career postings one thing is beyond dispute in Bangladesh: the first obstacle to buying a chess course is not chess, it is banking. A forty-to-sixty-dollar course equals two or three months of club coaching fees, and most juniors have no international card. Purchases happen through an acquaintance, or by routing a relative's account abroad. That is not a small detail — it decides who gets the course and who does not.

Then language. Reading an English opening course, our juniors fight vocabulary first and chess second. I launched "Chal" in March 2026 for exactly that reason, annotating move by move in Bangla. That is also when I stopped writing results and started writing positions — every piece opened with a board drawn in words before a single player's name appeared.

One thing about this course does match our reality, though. Premier Division players hold day jobs; junior club members go to school. Nobody has twenty hours a week for memorisation. A plan-based repertoire is structurally the right product. The limit is not its depth but its promise of a plan.

Signals seen from a distance

Batumi arrived to me through remote control, and since then the game has been a signal I can pause. I followed all eleven rounds of the 43rd Chess Olympiad from my room in Mymensingh — PGN in one hand, stream in the other eye. That ability to pause showed me something you cannot see live: not statistics about minority players, but the absence of repetition.

From a Mymensingh bedroom I learned the stadium is only a screen. And the pattern I keep finding in Bangladeshi club games on that screen is not opening ignorance. It is the absence of a plan after move twenty.

The contrarian angle: the gap a course cannot install

Let me first make the strongest case for the conventional view. Opening confidence is real — it saves clock time, calms the nerves, reduces the fear of embarrassment. A player with no preparation against the Colle or London frequently gives up the position by move twelve, and that psychological cost is genuine. On those terms, a six-video plan-based alternative is a valid answer to a valid problem.

Now let me turn it over. Across sixteen years of coaching juniors and a spreadsheet of Bangladeshi results I have kept since 2026, the decisive error almost never happens inside fifteen moves. It happens after move thirty, and most often in rook-and-pawn endings with seconds on the clock.

But the argument does not stop there. System openings are strong because they hand White a repeatable middlegame template — one he plays every game, while Black sees it once in five. A repertoire that only offers equality therefore feeds the system player's comfort. What Black needs is not equality but a target: a structure in which White's memorised game no longer repeats. Reaching that may cost a small theoretical concession, which is precisely what commercial packaging prefers not to advertise. Six videos will give you six Black plans; they will not give you your own repeated pattern — and rating rises on the second.

There is a further gap in continuity. A product like this is bought once, and after a single purchase the player stops reviewing his own record carefully. He cares who won or lost; he does not annotate where the position changed hands. That annotation is exactly what would expose the move-thirty problem.

What I will check next round

Keep the next twenty games where you play Black against 1.d4 in a separate file. Record three things: the result, the rating band, and the move on which the position first slipped away. If the median lands past move twenty-five, six videos will not move your rating — that is a calculation-and-endgame problem, not an opening one.

And if the number falls between eight and fourteen, the question becomes different: are you buying knowledge, or the feeling of being prepared? Knowing how to play for yourself is not sold in any course.