A Chess DVD and the Promise of an 'Antidote' to the Bayonet Attack

I once loaded the wrong SHB Đà Nẵng match tape, and that day I learned football does not forgive carelessness. The lesson is harsher still in chess, where every wrong move is recorded forever in a database. Earlier this week, reading a promotional document for an opening-training product released as a DVD, I recognised the same familiar carelessness. The title read plainly: 'Samarkand R2 (open): Despite close calls, all top teams grab wins.' That is the headline of a team-event round report. Yet everything beneath it discusses a DVD teaching how to meet the Bayonet Attack in the King's Indian Defense. Two unrelated texts packaged in one shell. For an analyst, that is the first red flag. A tape that is wrong from the very start is the most expensive lesson: the eye must always be verified. Context has to be made clear so no one misreads it. The King's Indian Defense, KID, is a classic hypermodern opening system: Black deliberately concedes the centre at once with 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 and ...Bg7, then counterattacks that very centre. Its sharpest branch is the Mar del Plata Variation, where Black plays ...Nc6 and ...e5, producing mutual wing attacks. By my own classification, this branch sits roughly between ECO E97 and E99. For decades White has met the Mar del Plata with the ninth move 9.b4, the Bayonet Attack — a sharp knife driven straight into Black's queenside. Black's orthodox reply for years has been 9...Nh5, a move that opens the position and forces both sides into lines that must be memorised by heart. Because of that forcing character, modern engines play a decisive role in preparation. The product being advertised proposes a different path: 9...a5. Instead of opening the position, Black pushes the queenside pawn to attack White's b4 pawn, steering toward a closed, manoeuvring game. According to the promotion, this is an 'antidote' for players tired of memorising too many lines. It targets a very specific readership: those who see themselves as thinking for themselves rather than memorising. The reasonable point deserves recognition before the rebuttal. 9...a5 is a secondary branch long known to theory, never a novelty. The value the seller aims at is practical: shifting a game from a battle of memory to a battle of thought. For a club player, that is a welcome proposal. The transfer market resembles a rook endgame: whoever reads the role first breathes a sigh of relief. Here the role is redefined, and that is the real selling point. But this is where I stop and check the source. The entire document offers not a single number. No win rate, no draw rate, no ACPL — the average centipawn loss against the engine's best move. Not one sample game is cited. No author name, no title, no record for the person who compiled it within the Mar del Plata itself. An opening-training product is, in the end, a promise about the quality of moves. A promise without evidence is advertising. The claim that caught my attention is the most suspect of all: 'computers often do not know how to handle these complex strategic positions.' That sentence is true — a decade or so ago. Before the AlphaZero era and neural-network engines, computers genuinely struggled in long-term positions with few forcing moves, such as the KID. Today neural-network engines handle those positions far better than the line implies. This is stale marketing language; its technical accuracy expired long ago. Then comes the claim that 'if Black knows what to do, things quickly become dangerous for White'. That is a directional assertion that cannot be verified: it depends entirely on the level of White's preparation. If White is a well-coached Bayonet player, is 9...a5 still 'dangerous' to that extent? The document does not answer. Based on my experience following games, absolute claims of this kind usually signal advertising rather than analysis. The counterintuitive angle sits here: we tend to think a closed, non-forcing move is safe. But at the top of chess, precisely those low-line positions are where long-term risk accumulates. A sharp branch like 9...Nh5 has the advantage that the road is already mapped — whoever remembers more, wins. 9...a5 instead pushes the player into open water, with no standard line to cling to. A player weaker in positional feel will sink faster, not slower. My experience following games teaches one thing: whenever someone sells an 'antidote', the theory market usually reacts in reverse within a single cycle. Opponents will re-examine the new branch, find an improvement, and the old 'antidote' quickly loses its magic. This has happened to more than a few KID branches praised as secret weapons before fading once analysed properly. 9...a5 faces the same risk: it is a branch familiar to prepared White players, so its practical value has a ceiling. Moreover, the mismatch between title and body is itself a matter of information integrity. A hasty reader could cite the wrong source, attributing DVD content to a team event in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. In this profession, such an error spreads faster than people think. What is worth keeping, after all this, is a test for the next game: does 9...a5 truly reduce the burden of memory, or merely change the type of burden? The answer only arrives when the branch appears in classical games by players above 2700. Until then, a sensible buyer should demand evidence before paying.