Seven Systems, Six Videos: The Catalan Gap in IM Valeri Lilov's Chess Course

The sound of a wooden piece touching the board is dry, like a finger tapping a drum skin. Saturday morning, a small coffee shop on Nguyễn Chí Thanh Street, Đà Nẵng. Hùng, 48, who has played since the era of mechanical clocks, loses his fourth game of the morning. In all four he holds Black. In all four his opponent opens 1.d4, then 2.Nf3, then 3.Bf4 — the London System, the opening you can learn in one evening and play for twenty years. Hùng does not make a mistake in any of them. He simply does not know where he is going.

I pour more tea and look at the board, still fully occupied. After eighteen years at the Thể thao Đà Nẵng newsroom, I once had a piece struck out by a twenty-seven-year-old editor for “writing literature in a sports report.” I left the paper, started a blog called Cỏ May, and began every piece with an image. I thought I had been exiled from the board; it turned out the board was leading me deeper into myself. This morning that image is Hùng’s hand placing a knight on f6 — a move that is correct in theory and wrong in human terms.

So when a new chess course appears, I read it with the eyes of the man sitting across from Hùng, not with the eyes of a grader.

The course and the man behind it

The product is a six-video series by IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. Its subject: building Black’s position against the systems White chooses when refusing 2.c4 — refusing the entire theoretical inheritance of the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen’s Gambit Accepted and the orthodox Queen’s Gambit Declined. The promotional copy calls that choice “not very ambitious.”

The list covers seven systems: Colle (ECO D04–D05), Trompowsky (A45), Torre (D03/A46), London (D02), Catalan (E00–E09), Blackmar-Diemer (D00) and Richter-Veresov (D01). Six videos, seven systems. That is the first subtraction I made when I folded the paper.

Of the author, the material offers only two verifiable facts: the IM title and the profession of Bulgarian trainer. No rating, no year the title was awarded, no recent competitive activity. In the online-course market the author’s title functions as a positioning signal: IM-authored courses usually aim at club players, while grandmaster repertoires aim at the 2100-plus band. There is no data with which to compare Lilov to specialists who have played these structures at the highest level.

Plans, not lines

What this course sells is not moves. The introduction itself says each opening gets “a relevant plan for Black.” That is teaching by plan — where the pieces go, which file opens, when to trade — rather than teaching by line — concrete sequences verified by an engine. For club players, plan-based teaching is the better pedagogical choice. But it is following the mainstream, not creating theory. Nowhere in the material is there a novelty, an engine sample, or a single scoring statistic.

The largest problem is one of classification. The Catalan is not a sideline; it is a mainline opening with a dense body of theory. It is reached by 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2 — White has already played c4. The Catalan therefore sits inside exactly the theoretical treasury White is fleeing. Packing it into the same basket as the Colle and the London is mixing two weight classes onto one bus. One sixth of the runtime cannot carry the Catalan; this is the thinnest point of the product and the hardest for a buyer to notice.

The Trompowsky is similar. The real Trompowsky is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 — a move that appears before Black commits to ...d5. If Black has already played ...d5, we are in a materially different line. The “after 1.d4 d5” frame the material uses to wrap everything together conceals a genuine move-order decision.

On difficulty, the six modules are not the same size. Colle, Torre and Blackmar-Diemer can be handled with plans plus a dozen concrete moves. Trompowsky and London demand accuracy against early ...c5, ...Ne4 and ...h6 ideas and against the trade of the dark-squared bishop. The Catalan demands a real strategic decision: take or decline on c4, open structures with ...dxc4 and ...b5, or closed ones with ...Nbd7, ...c6, ...b6. Four easy categories, two hard ones and one very hard one — across six videos. The buyer is effectively paying for one or two solid modules and several thin ones.

Then the gaps. A Black set-up built on the “1...d5 plus plans” frame will miss systems that reach the same structures by another route. The most conspicuous is the Jobava-Prie London — 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bf4, named after Baadur Jobava, today one of the most popular weapons at club level and at grandmaster level alike. Then come the g3/Bg2 “pseudo-Catalan” set-ups without c4: 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.g3. Neither appears in the introduction.

The danger is not in the position

The material simultaneously calls White’s play “not very ambitious” and these systems “extremely dangerous.” The two statements do not contradict each other when read correctly. The danger is not an objective White advantage. The danger is drift risk: White gets a riskless game, and if Black does not know the characteristic plan, Black drifts — one move at a time, without ever making a mistake, until he realises the position tilted some time ago without him noticing. Anyone who reads “extremely dangerous” as “these openings are objectively strong” will mis-calibrate every expectation.

Based on my own experience following club-level games, from evenings at the Đà Nẵng chess club to open tournaments in Hà Nội, the pattern repeats reliably: the player who loses to the London System does not lose on move ten. He loses on move thirty, when every piece is placed and he still has no idea.

So the real calculation for this product is not “does it beat the Catalan.” The calculation is: how many hours will the buyer spend learning plans, and where do those hours come from. If they come out of tactics and endgame work — the two pillars that actually produce rating points — a bargain can turn into a loss.

One thing I want to state plainly, having sat at this table long enough. This material is advertising copy, not reporting. No publisher is named, no price, no publication date, no runtime per video, no independent source. Even the headline is a literal translation of the German idiom “der richtige Königsweg,” which makes me suspect a re-promotion of an older recording. For a course on the Trompowsky and the London, the age of the recording is not a small matter: theory in those two systems moves faster than people assume.

And if you are wondering why a product this small deserves more than a thousand words from me: because it is a piece of a larger market. At the production layer, the cost of making an opening course is now very low. At the distribution layer, shops, blogs and affiliate channels push product with exactly the kind of article I am reading. At the bottom layer, the club, players drift toward systems that require less memory. The chain feeds itself, and that explains why Hùng keeps meeting the London.

What remains

I am not writing this to criticise a Bulgarian trainer. I am writing it because on Saturday morning, in that coffee shop, Hùng put the pieces back on the board and asked me: “So what should Black play?” That is the right question. The course answers part of it — the easy part, the London and Trompowsky part, the part a club player genuinely needs.

I have learned that some games need no brilliant move to be full of pain, and that some defeats lie not in a move but in the absence of a plan. This product sits in the middle tier of the opening-content market: above free videos, below the lifetime repertoires written by grandmasters. It survives because the demand is real. It will struggle if, within the next twenty months, someone releases a complete, engine-verified set covering both the sideroads and the mainlines.

As for Hùng, tonight he will go home, open his laptop and type the name of the London System into a search box. Every position is a conversation with oneself, and I have not yet finished writing the reply. What I hope is that he finds a plan rather than a table of variations to memorise — because at the board, what saves you on move thirty is not memory but understanding.