9...a5 Against the Bayonet: An Opening DVD Selling Delay, Not Data

The document I opened had two halves that did not match. The headline read "Samarkand R2 (open): Despite close calls, all top teams grab wins" — a team-event round report, with teams, pairings and results. The entire body discussed a training product: a chess DVD promoting 9...a5 against the Bayonet Attack in the King's Indian Defence. Not a single game, not a single team, not a single rating appeared in the body. Two unrelated texts had been stapled together, and nobody bothered to fix it. Forty-one years of following chess taught me that such splices are rarely harmless. They are harmless when the subject is a friendly match. They become a signal when the subject is an opening, where every move is priced by thousands of games accumulated across decades. A publisher who cannot align the headline with the content of their own product is asking you to trust their fifteen-move-deep analysis. I once believed in feeling, until a number knocked on my door at 3 a.m. That night I sat up, opened a database, and asked one question: how often has this 9...a5 actually been played, at what level, and with what results? The King's Indian Defence is a philosophical stance before it is an opening. Black lets White occupy the centre with 1.d4 and 2.c4, builds ...Nf6, ...g6 and ...Bg7, then declares that the centre will be eaten from the outside. Mar del Plata is the sharpest branch of that philosophy, located between ECO E97 and E99. Black plays ...Nc6 and ...e5, and then both sides sprint on opposite wings: White pushes b4-b5 to tear apart the queenside, Black pushes f5-f4 to tear apart the kingside. Whoever arrives first wins. Chess here looks like a bicycle race on a mountain road, with no chance to stop and think. The Bayonet Attack — 9.b4 — is White's modern answer. Instead of playing slowly, White grabs space immediately on the queenside and forces Black to declare an attitude. The orthodox reply is 9...Nh5: Black opens the position, pushes the play into forcing channels, and turns the game into a memory contest with computers in attendance. Professionals have grown used to it over roughly two decades, to the point where some treat it as a required ritual. The DVD this document advertises proposes another road: 9...a5. The move is not new. It is a recognised sideline, not a discovery. What deserves attention is how it is sold. The promotion claims that 9...a5 leads to sound positions with very few concrete lines, aimed at players who prefer to think for themselves rather than memorise. Its rival, 9...Nh5, is described as opening the position, forcing the lines, and making computer analysis important again. The product targets a specific segment: club-level players who want a weapon without wanting a syllabus. In the market I report on, opening products of this kind sell quickly, because they promise to save time — the scarcest asset a working chess player owns. But a promise to save time has to be checked against time itself. Now comes the data, and this part is suspiciously short. What can be verified: the 9.b4 a5 branch exists, is recorded in databases, and is known to prepared players. The promotional text itself does not dare claim this is a novelty. It only says "antidote". That is a practical claim rather than a theoretical one. When an opening product says "chances are equal", it is not saying Black is better. It is saying Black can survive without memorising. What cannot be verified: everything else. There is no ACPL. There is no engine-match rate. There is no win rate, no draw rate, not a single sample game. There is no author name, no title, no tournament record for the person teaching. An opening product that offers not one number about that opening is a product selling conviction, and conviction has no data column. Its theoretical backbone rests entirely on one sentence: computers often do not know how to handle these complex strategic positions. I read that sentence several times, and each time it felt like it arrived from a different decade. Before neural-network engines, machines did have blind spots in long-horizon positions, where a move's value only surfaces thirty moves later. That argument once worked as a sales tool. Today's engine generation handles King's Indian structures far better than the sentence admits. A stance built on an outdated premise can still be correct about the move, but it loses most of its weight when sold to a modern buyer. A product like this, if honest, would ship with a table: how many games in the database, Black's win rate, average deviation from the engine's top choice across the first thirty moves, and at least one practical game at grandmaster level. No table appears. Instead there is an absolute claim: if Black knows what he is doing, things may quickly become dangerous for White. That claim cannot be tested, and precisely because it cannot be tested, it cannot be wrong. This is the common feature of all good advertising. There is also a market paradox. This product competes directly with free databases and analysis tools available to everyone. Its entire added value lies in structure: a storyteller has rearranged thousands of games into a walkable route. That is the value of editing rather than of discovery. Buyers pay for an order, not for a secret. Here I think of the summer of 2026, when stadiums stood empty and I sat for two months in front of transfer data tables. When the stadium is empty, the true value of a person starts to speak. I learned that from football and carried the principle into chess: once the roar is stripped away, what remains is the number, and the number does not flatter anyone. This is where I want to flip the conventional view. The easiest reaction to such a product is to doubt 9...a5. I do not doubt it. The move is legitimate. The problem lies elsewhere, and it is subtler: the phrase "very few concrete lines" has been mistranslated by readers into "very little calculation". In the Mar del Plata, no branch removes calculation. The 9...a5 line changes the type of work, not the volume. After it, the position closes, the pieces meet more slowly, and the burden shifts from memory to judgement. For a club player, that is a reasonable trade. For someone who believes they have just bought intellectual leisure, it is a carefully packaged expectation gap. The real twist, though, sits in the headline splice I found at the start. One headline about a team event in Samarkand, one body about a DVD. Two unrelated subjects, stapled into the same information package. This says nothing about 9...a5, but it says a great deal about the packager. If a publisher cannot keep the headline aligned with the content of their own product, the level of verification inside their variations deserves a similar question mark. One more thing analysts usually skip: every sideline has a life cycle. When a sideline is widely advertised, it stops being a sideline. Prepared White players will answer within one theory cycle, often just months. An antidote holds its value only until the other side reads the prescription. There are players the world forgets, but data never forgets them. Here it is the reverse: the DVD author is unnamed, and without a name there is no data. An anonymous author sells a sideline to an audience given no tool to check it. That is the real risk of this transaction, not the strength of the a5 pawn move. So what should we track in the coming months? The appearance of 9...a5 in classical games at 2700 level and above is the cleanest gauge. If it appears and holds, the product's premise is partly confirmed. If it vanishes within three months, we have our answer without buying the disc. Alongside that, the frequency of the Bayonet Attack itself in opening trees will decide the product's shelf life: an antidote only means something while the disease remains common. And I am still waiting for a human name. To look it up, rather than to judge it. I light a candle for data. But I always let the flame of feeling illuminate the question.