The Right King Road: An Anti-1.d4 Chess Course Through the Looking Glass

At midnight in Da Nang, I reopened a website selling a chess course. The headline read: The Right King Road. A chessboard has no right side, only white and black squares; a king’s road cannot turn aside and abandon half the board. The headline writer had machine-translated the German idiom der richtige Königsweg, and in that instant I understood I was holding an advertisement disguised as analysis. In 2026, a 27-year-old editor killed my story, saying I wrote prose in sports news. I left the newsroom after eighteen years, started the blog Co May, and learned to watch every match with different eyes. Tonight, standing before this course, I face the old question again: what remains after the words? The product is a six-video series by IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. It gives Black a plan against seven White systems that avoid 2.c4: Colle, Trompowsky, Torre, London, Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer and Richter-Veresov. The sales page calls these systems extremely dangerous and mentions the pain of many players; the same page concedes that White chooses them because they are not ambitious. Two sentences stand side by side and point in opposite directions, and that is the moment when a player must decide what to trust. I have watched the chess-course market since my newspaper days. People used to buy grandmaster books, open a wooden board, copy every line. Now they buy videos, watch on phones, and what they want to keep after a lesson is a feeling of handling the pieces rather than a sequence of moves. Six videos, seven systems, an author with an IM title and not one verified game published. In this market, the title of trainer is like an introduction on the radio: it opens, but it does not replace the body of the broadcast. Seven systems inside six videos feel overcrowded from the start. The product belongs to the plans category: a club-level player facing the London System or the Trompowsky needs to know where the pieces go, which wing the pawns advance on, whether to trade queens, not thirteen engine moves. Plans-based teaching has real value. But that value depends on the steepness of each system: Colle and Torre are gentle, Trompowsky and London demand accuracy against c5, Ne4 and h6 ideas, and the Catalan lives on another planet. The Catalan deserves a separate paragraph. When White plays 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5, that is mainline theory, a dense library of modern chess, belonging to the very world of theory the page says White is fleeing. Six videos carrying seven systems, with one system ten times heavier than the others; can one video give the Catalan real time, or only a few polite words before the film moves on? I found no answer in the article. I found no number anywhere: no ACPL, no engine-match percentage, no sample game, no rating for the author. In my trade I call the real danger of these quiet systems drift. White is not better, but Black loses the compass; after nineteen uneventful moves, the player with the black pieces suddenly stands beneath a game with no signature. The pain the advertisement evokes comes from Black not knowing a plan, more than from any inferior position. Understood that way, a buyer knows what the course actually sells: a map for two or three common systems, and the rest is invitation. There were nights when I thought I had been exiled from the chessboard when I left the newsroom; it turned out the chessboard led me deeper into myself. The move that looked like a loss was the decisive move. I teach a small chess class in Da Nang; the oldest student is seventy-two, the youngest eight. When I show them a London System position, almost everyone asks the same question: how do I avoid being dragged into the other person’s game? That question is the exact pain the advertisement exploits. My answer never changes: a plan only lives when you know why the move is right, and that requires a little theory, a little analysis, a little patience. A course can give you the map; the road still has to be walked. Move-order logic is also shaky. The real Trompowsky starts with 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5, before Black has time to play ...d5, while the advertised frame locks onto 1...d5. A careful buyer should ask: among seven systems, which are truly taught and which only named? To be fair, a clear instruction for club players is still worth more than a warehouse of half-remembered lines. The London and Trompowsky videos are probably the most valuable part of the package, because they close the largest gap in an amateur’s preparation. The blind spot sits inside the 1...d5-and-plans frame itself. It ignores modern systems that reach similar structures by other routes, above all the Jobava-Prie London: 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bf4, a weapon used widely from club to grandmaster level. It also skips the g3-with-Bg2 setups without c4. If the course was recorded before the Jobava London boom, its answers will feel dated against well-read opponents. In 2026 I broadcast a match in a stadium empty of twenty thousand people and wrote that football without spectators is a poem missing a beat; a course without data is like that, beautiful in its promise, thin in its body. My advice fits into one move: watch a sample video before buying, open the table of contents, look for the Jobava London. If it is absent, treat the product as a supplementary plan layer, not as an exclusive theory vault. There is another layer of meaning in the title. People avoid 2.c4 because they fear theory; they buy a plans course to avoid memorising; but when everyone avoids, the meeting point moves to squares few people know. I have seen young players spend hours on openings while their time for endgames and tactics shrinks. From a training perspective, a royal road should begin with a few correct moves among many sufficient ones. The author of the ad never answers who verified the content, and in forty years of work I have learned that the most suspicious silence is the silence after a grand promise. I closed the laptop at three in the morning. The city slept like a board where no move had been made. In German, der richtige Königsweg means the correct road, suggesting there is no shortcut; chess, like journalism, has no shortcuts, only the discipline of standing at the board long enough to see what others miss. My question tonight is simple: do these six videos teach people to stay with the game, or teach them to run from theory? The right royal road, if it exists, begins with one sober move.