9...a5 and the Promised Antidote to the Bayonet Attack: Notes on a Chess DVD With No Author's Name

On the board, White's pawn steps to b4. Black does not answer immediately. Then a5 appears, quietly, like a door closing behind someone's back. The two pawns stand exactly one square apart, and through the whole game they never touch. That gap decides the rhythm of everything that follows.

I sat with this position for a long while in a small club in Saint Petersburg, where March snow falls late and never settles. Two players beside me were arguing about a chess DVD neither of them had ever watched. One insisted it had solved the Bayonet Attack. The other said nothing, and pushed the pawn to a5.

That is why I am writing this.

What is the Bayonet Attack, and why would it make anyone think of a DVD?

The story starts with a name rarely spoken: Mar del Plata. It is a coastal city in Argentina, where a 2026 tournament attached its name permanently to a branch of the King's Indian Defence. In that system Black concedes the centre to White and counterattacks it later, with a knight on c6 and a pawn pushed to e5. In the ECO classification, the branch sits roughly between E97 and E99.

Toward the end of the 1980s, leading players looked for a way to slow that rhythm down. The move 9.b4 appeared, and it came to be called the Bayonet Attack. White pushes the pawn to b4 first, gains space on the queenside, and forces Black to answer a hard question: how do you take the initiative back?

For decades, the orthodox answer was 9...Nh5. The knight jumps to the rim, threatens exchanges, opens the kingside, and turns the game into a race of calculation. That is the main line, and every database is full of it.

9...a5 is a sideline. It has existed for a long time, it is known, it is recorded. But it has never been the main move. And that is precisely the point an instructional product wants to exploit: to sell buyers the feeling that they hold an antidote most opponents have never seen.

The promotional material for this product — most likely a Fritztrainer, the DVD instruction format common in the German-language market — revolves around a single promise: to change the character of the game.

After 9...Nh5 the position opens up, the lines become concrete and easy for an engine to check. After 9...a5, the advertising says, the position closes. Few concrete lines. Plenty of room for strategic thinking. And here is the most striking sentence: computers often do not know how to handle such complex strategic positions.

I stopped at that sentence for a long time.

In December 2026, AlphaZero appeared and beat Stockfish in a match of one hundred games. Since then, neural-network engines handle long-term strategic positions — exactly the kind the King's Indian produces — far better than the previous generation. The claim that computers do not understand is the language of an era that has passed.

None of this means 9...a5 is a bad move. It only means the sales argument rests on an old premise.

On the technical side, I found no data backing this product at all. No ACPL, the average centipawn loss. No match rate against the engine's top choice. Not a single sample game cited. The only thing offered is a qualitative phrase: few concrete lines.

In my trade, that is a signal to read more slowly.

Based on my experience following games in Russian team events and regional qualifiers, I can say this: after 9...a5, Black often lands in a cramped but durable position. White keeps the long-term initiative. Black has good structure, but nothing that forces White to suffer immediately. The game becomes a marathon, and the winner is usually the more patient player, not the one who memorised more variations.

And here is the paradox of the product: it promises no memorisation, yet to play this branch well you still have to understand Mar del Plata. You still have to know when to trade, when to keep. No move is immune to thinking.

For years I watched hundreds of King's Indian games in club events. One thing kept repeating: players lost not because they lacked variations, but because they misread their own position. White pushes b4 and then does not know what to do next. Black pushes a5 and waits. Both sides wait for the other to collapse.

The paradox of the chess theory market is this: it sells certainty in a game whose nature is uncertainty.

That market runs much like a transfer window. It offers answers to whatever variation is fashionable, and every new product carries an implicit promise: this variation has been solved. But the real value of a counter is confirmed only when it appears on a real board, against a prepared opponent.

And 9...a5, at this moment, is still waiting for that confirmation.

The transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope. I wrote that line years ago about football. Put it on a chess DVD and it still stands.

There is one detail in the original document I cannot pass over.

Its title describes a team event round in Samarkand: round two, open section, all the top teams winning despite close calls. But the entire body of the text is about a DVD teaching 9...a5 against the Bayonet Attack. The two documents have nothing to do with each other.

That detail deserves a pause. Samarkand will host the Chess Olympiad in 2026, and any line attached to that city deserves to be read seriously. When a report about a team round is spliced onto the introduction of a DVD, what is lost is not a headline but the ability to trace a source.

A source you cannot trace is not a source. It is a piece of paper someone dropped.

When the stadium has no ball, memory starts scoring. But memory only scores when people still remember where it came from. A text with a mismatched title and body is a memory that has lost its root.

On theory, I also do not believe the promise of few lines. The Mar del Plata is one of the sharpest systems in modern chess, and it is ravenous in its calculation. Garry Kasparov used the King's Indian as a weapon in world championship matches. 9...a5 slows the game down; it does not make it simple.

The counter is real, but it is a second-order counter, not an invention. It can help club players who want to escape memorisation. It will not change the theoretical picture at the very top.

And one thing is rarely said: this product's pitch targets the buyer's self-image, aimed at people who like to think for themselves rather than memorisers. That is identity-based selling, not analysis. It is not ethically wrong. It is just not chess theory.

On the day the heart stopped beating, I learned to beat slower but deeper. I wrote that after a night at Luzhniki, when football taught me that sometimes the slower rhythm is the one that keeps people in the room. A King's Indian game after 9...a5 beats at that same rhythm: slow, deep, and promising nothing except that the player must understand what he is doing.

The question I want to leave is not whether 9...a5 is stronger than 9...Nh5. The question is this: when a chess culture buys more and more antidotes, is it learning chess better, or just spending money faster?

The DVD may still be sitting unopened in its box. But the one-square gap between the two pawns is still there, waiting for someone to sit down and think.