9...a5 and the Flight from Memory in Modern Chess

Late autumn in Saint Petersburg; the first snow has not yet fallen, but the wind off the Neva already bites. In a small chess club on Rubinstein Street, I sit watching a middle-aged man leaf through a thick notebook beside the board. He is not looking at the pieces. He is looking at the notebook. That is how he plays — by memory, not by eye. Thirty years ago, when I began writing about chess for a sports magazine in Russia, people sat for hours at the board to understand the position. Now they sit for hours at the screen to memorize it. When the board runs out of new moves, memory begins to calculate.

The story I want to tell lives in the King's Indian Defence, one of the most emotionally charged strategic systems in modern chess. Specifically, the Mar del Plata variation, where Black answers 7...Nc6 and then 8...Ne7, accepting a closed centre so that both sides can tear open opposite wings: White floods the queenside with c5 and b4, Black counterattacks the kingside with f5 and g5. There is no peace here. Only two storms blowing in opposite directions, and the winner is whoever understands his own storm better.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, White found a crowbar: the move 9.b4, the Bayonet Attack. It seizes queenside space and disrupts Black's kingside schedule. From then on, the main line of the whole system became 9...Nh5 — the answer Kasparov and an entire generation of top players used as a life-and-death test. Then time passed. The 9...Nh5 line was dissected square by square. Databases thickened like January snow. Anyone holding the black pieces knew that a single slip would drag them into a battle of memory — where the computer has already calculated everything, and the human has not.

Based on my experience following games across decades, I noticed something rarely said aloud: when opening theory becomes too thick, players do not look for a stronger path. They look for a lighter one. And that is where a market appears.

A training product in the form of an opening DVD, in the ChessBase/Fritztrainer style, arrives with a simple promise: stop playing 9...Nh5, play 9...a5 instead. At first hearing, one might think it is a new theoretical discovery. It is not. 9...a5 is a known sideline, merely fading from the elite stage. But it does not need to be new. It needs to be useful.

The key point I want to stress: the real value of 9...a5 is not that it is stronger than 9...Nh5, but that it forces fewer concrete lines. The main 9...Nh5 line is where variations become forced and computer analysis becomes paramount. Meanwhile 9...a5 is marketed as a place where very few concrete lines exist, where a player is allowed to think with his own head instead of flipping through a notebook. That is a reasonable argument in practical terms. It reflects an economic reality of modern chess: once elite preparation has been saturated by computers, a new market is born — the market for practical escape hatches. The opening market is where people sell memory to buy peace of mind.

But there is a gap here that cannot be filled. The promotional product offers no illustrative game, no frequency data, no engine evaluation, no named practitioner of the line. Only assertions. And in chess, an assertion without an ACPL figure, without a match-rate against the engine, remains just a promise. The article's own author concedes that objectively the chances are equal — but that is the author's verdict, not the product's, and it is not demonstrated by any data at all.

Now comes the uncomfortable part. This product sells a claim I consider outdated: that computers often do not know how to handle the arising complex strategic positions. That is pre-AlphaZero thinking. Modern neural-network engines — Leela, and Stockfish today — evaluate closed, manoeuvring King's Indian positions far more reliably than the 2010s generation did. The claim is half right: machines remain weak at long-horizon strategic judgement, but not at complex positions as such. What is notable is that this is the load-bearing argument of the entire marketing piece — the weakest evidence supporting the strongest claim. That is the classic signature of promotional technical writing.

The writer himself concedes: if you play 9...Nh5, the lines become forced and the computer becomes important again. That means the value of 9...a5 exists only on the condition that you avoid the main line. That is not a universal improvement. It is a side path, conditional, and with a shelf life. And one more thing: opening sidelines cannot be exclusive. Once published, opponents and their seconds can prepare against them. The advantage of very few concrete lines erodes with popularity. The more successful the product, the faster it undermines its own value.

I want to add one note about a marketing mismatch. The product is simultaneously promoted as being for players who like to think for themselves instead of memorizing, and as being for time-poor players because it has very few concrete lines. Those are two different buyer profiles: the independent thinker and the busy pragmatist. The article merges them into one. That is not technically wrong, but it blurs who the product is really for. On values, I choose to stand with the independent thinker — the one who understands why 9...a5 works, not merely that it works.

The heart stops beating, the heart still beats. Chess is the same. An opening line can be forgotten, but the idea behind it never dies — it only waits for another generation to wake it with a clearer head. After so many years, I have learned that the day the heart stops beating, I learn to beat more slowly but more deeply. Perhaps the chess world should learn the same: slower, but deeper.

This product is, in essence, promotional material dressed as technical commentary, and that forces me to read it with two eyes. The first eye notes the honesty in not claiming 9...a5 is absolutely superior. The second eye reminds me that every argument used to sell a product must be discounted. In chess, memory is a commodity, but understanding is a skill. The seller can sell you the commodity. No one can sell you the skill unless you train it yourself.

I write this not to disparage a product. I write to remind myself of one thing: when the board runs out of new moves, humans still have something the computer cannot copy — understanding. But understanding is only worth something if we are willing to verify it, rather than merely hearing it advertised. As for 9...a5, some will find it bland. Some will find it a small door just wide enough to breathe. Both are right. Only, any door must ultimately be opened by oneself. And if forced to choose between a thick notebook and a bright head, I would still choose the head — because any notebook will grow old, while a mind that knows how to think never runs out of moves.