'The Right Royal Road': Seven Systems, Six Videos, and the Catalan Gap

In a small chess cafe in District 3, Saigon, a man of about forty places his queen back on d1 after a third straight loss to the London System. He says nothing. His left index finger draws a line under the note 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Bf4, then he slides the paper across the table. The young coach opposite him picks it up, opens his phone, and offers a six-video course. Its title, translated straight from the German Der richtige Königsweg, sounds impressive: the right royal road.

Nobody at that table notices something simple. Königsweg in German means the perfect solution, the road that cannot be bettered, a marketing idiom rather than a novelty on the board. That title is the first trace showing the source document is not reporting but product copy.

And the story worth telling is not the list of seven openings. It is that an individual coach is now selling club chess something that once existed only in grandmaster analysis rooms: a middlegame plan after the opening. That market, in Vietnam and globally, grows every day.

CONTEXT: THE CLUB META HAS CHANGED ITS TASTE

Over the past decade the opening landscape at club level has shifted noticeably. A new generation raised on online platforms picks low-theory systems: the Colle (1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3), the Torre (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Bg5), the London (1.d4 with Nf3 and Bf4), the Trompowsky (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5). Their common traits are easy to spot: few moves to memorise, stable piece structures, and White rarely losing inside the first twenty moves.

From my own experience watching games at amateur events in Saigon and Hanoi over several years, the pattern repeats almost as a rule: Black does not lose because the position is worse, but because he does not know what to do on move fifteen.

That is the point many Black players miss. These systems are not objectively strong. They are merely awkward because Black has no plan. White does not win with theory; White wins on the opponent's drift.

The course the young coach offers is built precisely for that gap. The author is IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer, with six videos demonstrating one representative plan for Black against each system. The list in the promotional text includes the Colle, Trompowsky, Torre, London, Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and Richter-Veresov.

That number, seven systems, deserves a pause. Because the product has only six videos.

ANALYSIS: SEVEN SYSTEMS, SIX VIDEOS, AND A NAME IN THE WRONG CATEGORY

Read only the marketing and the buyer will imagine a complete opening theory set. In fact the material describes itself as a collection of suitable plans for Black, a product that teaches thinking rather than lines. That is a sound pedagogical choice for club players, but it also means this is not a theoretical reference work, and there is no claim anywhere about a novelty, an engine match rate, or an ACPL figure.

The product's real value sits at the level of the middlegame plan, not at the level of move-by-move accuracy.

The biggest technical problem is the Catalan. The Catalan (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2) is not a system that avoids theory. It is a mainline opening, catalogued E00 to E09 in ECO, with a dense theoretical body. Placing it alongside the Colle or the Torre creates a category mismatch: one is a mainline, the other a sideline. A single video cannot cover the Catalan at practical depth, and buyers expecting a working module here will almost certainly be disappointed.

The second problem is move order. The Trompowsky proper (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5, ECO A45) arises before Black commits to ...d5. A framework that begins after 1.d4 d5 does not describe that path; it produces a different, more loosely named position. Meanwhile the Blackmar-Diemer (1.d4 d5 2.e4) is a romantic gambit, not a quiet system. Grouping it with the London mixes two strategic categories in one catalogue.

The third problem, and perhaps the most practical for Vietnamese buyers, is that difficulty across the six videos is uneven. The Colle, Torre and Blackmar-Diemer can be handled with plans plus a few dozen concrete moves. The Trompowsky and London demand accuracy against ...c5, ...Ne4 and ...h6 ideas and against the dark-squared bishop trade. The Catalan demands a genuine repertoire decision, between the open branch with ...dxc4, ...b5 and ...Bb4+, and closed structures with ...Nbd7, ...c6, ...b6. For a single purchase, the buyer is effectively paying for one strong module and several thin ones.

Then there are the gaps. A 1...d5 plus plans frame misses systems that reach the same structures by other routes, most notably the Jobava-Prie London (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bf4), named after Baadur Jobava, one of the most popular weapons at club level and at the elite level in recent years. Setups with g3 and Bg2 without c4 do not appear on the list either. Whether they are covered inside the videos the promotional text does not say, and that is exactly the blind spot a buyer should check before paying.

At Vietnamese national team level these systems barely appear. Le Quang Liem and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son play mainline openings where concrete theory decides. That separation makes one thing clear: this product belongs to the club market, not the elite tier.

THE COUNTER-INTUITIVE ANGLE: THE CONTRADICTION SITS INSIDE THE SALES PITCH

What stands out is that the promotional text contradicts itself. In the same passage it calls White's approach not very ambitious, then asserts that these same systems are extremely dangerous.

In chess those two statements do not exclude each other. The danger is not an objective White advantage; it is drift risk. White gets a riskless game, and Black, lacking the characteristic plan, drifts while White accumulates. Reading extremely dangerous as an objective evaluation is a misreading; it describes drift risk.

And that depends on rating band. Below 2026 these systems genuinely hurt. Above 2200, when the opponent has concrete theory, the plan layer stops being enough. Under fast time controls plans hold up better than half-remembered lines. In classical play against a booked opponent, they do not.

One more thing the promotional text omits: provenance. The title is translated from a German idiom, and there is no publisher name, no publication date, no runtime, no price. A proper review would state all of those. Their absence, together with the purchase recommendation, shows this is affiliate-style marketing content, not independent journalism. The distinction matters, because every fact in the source text is a vendor claim.

The biggest risk for a Vietnamese buyer is not content quality but expectation. The real death of a golden generation is when we stop remembering them. For a chess community, the death of a method is when learners forget what it was for. A plan is not a theory store; it is a map for the first ten moves of the middlegame.

TAKEAWAY

As I write this, thousands of club players are losing to the London System tonight. They will buy the course. Some will improve. Some will realise they paid for something a free opening explorer and an engine already provide.

There is nothing wrong with buying plans. What is wrong is buying plans while expecting a complete theory store. An empty stand still has an echo, if we are quiet enough to hear it. And in that empty analysis room, what echoes back is not a novelty but someone asking: after move twelve, where do I go?

IM Valeri Lilov's answer may be right. But it is one road, not the only road. Generations will pass, but the poem about them keeps being written. For Vietnam's club chess scene, the lesson is not the seven systems listed, but how a trainer packages plans into a product, and how buyers must protect themselves with a checklist before pressing pay.