9...a5 and the Antidote to the Bayonet: What Lies Behind an Opening DVD

On a Saturday night at a small chess club on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street in Da Nang, I sat behind a seventeen-year-old student. He had just downloaded an opening course on disc, opened a digital board, and within twenty minutes had filled a page: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 O-O 6.Be2 e5 7.O-O Nc6 8.d5 Ne7 9.b4 a5. He looked up, eyes bright, and told me that from now on he would not have to memorize anything. I did not have the heart to say anything. Nine years ago, at forty-seven, I too believed in a move the way you believe in a lottery ticket. I thought I had been exiled from the board, when in fact the board carried me deeper into myself. To understand why a move on move nine is worth paying for, you have to start at the root. The King's Indian Defence, Mar del Plata variation, is one of the thorniest systems in modern chess, sitting in the ECO range E97 to E99. Black concedes the centre from the start, falls back, builds a structure, then counterattacks with ...e5 and ...Nc6. White piles up on the queenside, Black pushes on the kingside, and the two sides race to see who mates first. Then comes 9.b4, the Bayonet Attack, and everything tightens. White pushes the b-pawn, grabs queenside space, and forces Black to answer immediately. The orthodox reply for decades has been 9...Nh5: a move that opens the position, forces the lines, and drags both sides into a calculation race where the engine is the referee. Books call it the main line, and most players know it. The product now on sale proposes a different reply: 9...a5. That branch has existed for a long time, sitting quietly in the theory archive; few players choose it, because it denies Black the pleasure of a decisive counterblow. The body of the promotional text bets on a very clear idea: 9...Nh5 opens the position, forces the lines, and makes computer analysis important again, whereas 9...a5 leads to sound positions with very few concrete lines. What is worth noting is that the item carrying this text bears a headline about round two of a team event in Samarkand, where all the top teams won — a mismatch between headline and body that should make any reader wary. The difference between the two moves lies in the character of the game, not in superiority. 9...Nh5 asks White a concrete question; fail to answer and you lose. 9...a5 asks a vaguer one: do you actually know how to play chess? For an improving player, the second question is kinder. For a well-prepared one, it is not hard at all. Then comes the part I feel obliged to state plainly. The seller asserts that chances are equal after 9...a5. That is a positional claim, not a theoretical novelty. Not a single sample game is cited. No win rate, no average centipawn loss, no author name, no engine evaluation. An opening course that will not show a buyer one variation with a concrete assessment leaves a gap wider than the move itself. Based on my experience following games since 2026, when I was still a player and then a tournament organiser in Da Nang, I have learned one thing: opening sellers do not sell moves. They sell a feeling of safety. And safety always has a price. This product targets a very specific buyer: people who describe themselves as thinking for themselves rather than memorizing. That is an identity-based sales angle. It aims straight at the sore spot of the club player, who fears being dragged into a line the opponent knows by heart and he does not. At the board, that fear is real. But the medicine comes with a dated assumption: that computers often do not know how to handle complex strategic positions. That was true before AlphaZero. Today neural-network engines handle the long-horizon positions of the King's Indian far better than the advertisement implies. It is expired marketing language rather than a technical judgement. The real blind spot sits here. People believe that moving from a forced branch to a strategic one is an escape from memorization. But 9...a5 is not immune to an opponent's preparation. It only changes the kind of question. A well-prepared White player can still find play, and at that moment the Black player — who has paid, believed, and entered the position convinced he knows what he is doing — is the most passive man in the room. A move saves no one; it only buys a little more time to think. The most troubling part of the whole story lies off the board. An item headlined as a round-two team report from Samarkand, where the top teams all won, turns out in its body to be a promotion for an opening disc. Two separate texts were spliced together. Anyone who reads it and cites it will carry an error they do not know they have. For someone twenty years in the trade, that is a harder fault to forgive than a wrong move. A wrong move loses a game. A wrong source loses trust. Back to that Saturday class. My student will win a few club games with 9...a5, then lose a few, then understand that no ninth move can replace the rest of the work. Chess does not reward the one who remembers most; it rewards the one who stays seated longer after forgetting. I am not telling him not to buy it. I only hope he opens his notebook and writes one line under 9...a5: this is where someone else has walked before, and the rest is mine. A move is only worth something when the person holding it understands why he chose it, rather than because someone told him it is the answer.