The Theory Tax: Why Black Repertoire Courses Are Drawing Club-Level Chess Players

There was a Thursday evening when I sat in the corner of a chess club in a narrow alley off Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street, behind a player rated 1782. He had the white pieces. He played 1.d4, his opponent answered ...d5. At that point the board split into two roads. The first road was 2.c4 — the door into the theoretical inheritance of the Queen's Gambit, where the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the QGA and the Orthodox QGD all wait in line. The second road was 2.Nf3, and three moves later the pawn move Bf4 appeared: the London System. He chose the second road without a second's hesitation. I wrote that game into my notebook. It was the eleventh game in two months in which I had counted the same script: a club-level player, capable of calculation, deliberately stepping away from mainstream openings. They are not foolish. They are dodging a tax — what I call the theory tax. That V-League summer, I learned one thing: a formation only looks beautiful when the opponent agrees to stand still. I borrowed that line from football, but it holds for the chessboard in an unexpected way. A mainstream opening line only lives when both sides agree to memorise the same theoretical tree. When one side steps outside that tree, the beautiful formation on paper instantly becomes an unsolved equation. People avoid 2.c4 not because they fear losing within fifteen moves. They avoid 2.c4 because the price of standing firm through those fifteen moves is too high relative to the actual benefit. That is the definition of the theory tax: the compulsory theory that must be loaded into your head before the game even begins, only to avoid falling behind at move fifteen — not even to win. Football after the 2026 shutdown taught me a similar lesson. That year I discarded half my old dataset because I realised the sport had changed. Club-level chess has changed too, but in the opposite direction: it did not change because of a pandemic, it changed because the analytical tools became too strong. When chess engines and vast databases allow anyone to look up to move twenty-five, memorisation becomes an investment with diminishing returns at club level. That is the fertile ground for a notable phenomenon: the rise of non-mainstream opening systems. The London System, the Colle System, the Torre Attack, the Trompowsky Attack, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, the Richter-Veresov Opening. They share one trait: the player with white does not need to memorise a long theoretical tree. They only need a plan. I used to dismiss this group of openings. I thought they were the play of the lazy. Until I sat down and counted. Of the eleven games I recorded at club level, seven saw white choose a non-mainstream system instead of 2.c4. In four of those seven, the player with black spent more than twenty minutes of clock time finding move twelve — while the opponent spent three. That is not laziness. That is a strategy of shifting the burden. Look at the structure. The London System with 1.d4, Nf3, Bf4 and e3 creates a closed, stable block in which white knows exactly what to do for the next twenty moves: push e3, develop Bd3, Nbd2, bring a rook to the centre, then wait. The Colle System with 1.d4, Nf3, e3, Bd3 is the same — a wall with a kingside attacking plan. The Torre Attack with 1.d4, Nf3, Bg5 pressures f6 from the start. The Trompowsky with 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 attacks black's structure directly before white commits to anything. The key point is this: these systems are not strong in absolute theoretical terms. They are strong in practical terms. They move the problem from memory to planning, and at club level the player with the clearer plan holds the larger psychological advantage. I never underestimate a player who enters a game with a plan in mind while the opponent is still trying to recall move eleven. And that gap is precisely where the instructional content market charges in. A recent course by IM Valeri Lilov — a Bulgarian International Master — aims straight at that gap. The product consists of six videos, designed for black to counter non-mainstream d4 systems. The pitch is clear: many white players skip 2.c4 to avoid the heavy theory of the Slav, Semi-Slav, QGA and Orthodox QGD. They turn to system openings, and according to the promotional material, the Colle, Trompowsky, Torre and London are described as 'extremely dangerous'. The course's selling point lies in its promise: for each opening, black will have a relevant plan. Not a twenty-move theoretical tree, but a plan. The scope is extended beyond the four systems named above to include the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov Opening. This is where I have to stop and open my notebook to check. Six videos for more than eight openings. Simple division tells me each topic receives a very modest amount of time. That is both the strength and the weakness at once. The strength: fast learners get a general map. The weakness: that map has no depth to withstand it when the opponent departs from the advertised script. And at club level, opponents depart from the script constantly. Then I checked the opening taxonomy again, and this is where I need to speak plainly. The promotional material frames the entire content around the story of 'after 1.d4 d5'. But the Trompowsky Attack begins with 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 — there is no ...d5 by black in it. The Torre Attack is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3, then Bg5 — it also does not pass through ...d5. And the Catalan, in its standard form 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3, is itself an opening with 2.c4, meaning it sits inside the group the pitch claims players are avoiding. Three of the seven systems named do not match the logical frame the material builds. This is not a small error. No tactic is ever old, only the way a game is read can expire — and the reading here expired at the classification stage. When an instructional product misclassifies its own openings, I begin to doubt the rest of the syllabus. Not because IM Lilov lacks competence — he is an International Master, a professional coach. But because the promotional frame is written by someone who wants to sell, not someone who wants to teach. Let me talk about the market context to understand why this happens. The chess instructional content market is saturated. At the top tier are repertoires written by grandmasters on major platforms, with depth running to thousands of variations. In the middle tier are titled coaches — like IM Lilov — offering moderately sized products. At the bottom tier is a sea of free content on video platforms and blogs, where almost every variation of every opening is available at no cost. In such a market, competitive advantage no longer lies in raw analysis. It lies in curation, in branding, and in packaging. The promise of 'one plan per opening' is a product of that market pressure. It sounds more appealing than 'a complete theoretical tree' because it strikes the greatest fear of the club player: the fear of being lost in a game without understanding what they are doing. The transfer market is chess, not a card game — but many sporting directors like to flip cards. I borrow that image to talk about the content market: this is a real game, with real moves, but people often sell you a card instead of a board. There is another detail that caught my attention, and it belongs to the article itself rather than to the course. The title of the original document mentions Timur Turlov. But throughout the deconstructed content — the information points, the product description, the instructor introduction — that name never appears once. Conversely, the name Valeri Lilov never appears in the title. The title is about one person, the content is about another person's product. The two halves of the same document do not match. In my profession, this is the gravest kind of error. Not a technical error — a wrong move can be fixed with an engine. But a sourcing error. When a title and a body belong to two different subjects, I no longer know what I am reading. Is this an interview given the wrong title? Or an advertisement given the wrong sponsor's name? Or a portal page extracted incorrectly? There is no way to answer from the content provided. I used to dismiss such things. I thought that with chess content you just read the content and ignore the shell. But seventeen years of watching the industry taught me the opposite: a wrong shell usually points to a problem inside. When an article is inconsistent with itself on its first line, I am forced to downgrade the reliability of every number that follows. And here, the numbers that follow are thin. There is no rating for the instructor. No sample games. No win rate, no draw rate, no database sample of any kind. No move-quality metric such as average centipawn loss. The entire technical content rests on assertion, not evidence. In an analysis by anyone, that would be unacceptable. In a promotional product, it is predictable. Let me add a note on the phrase 'extremely dangerous'. It is directionally correct but unquantified. The London, the Colle, the Torre and the Trompowsky are genuinely annoying at club level, especially for an unprepared black player. But calling them 'extremely dangerous' without attaching a single win rate is sales language, not analytical language. A heat map can lie, but five consecutive failed presses cannot. Here I have no five failed presses to check. I have only a pitch. I also note how the material describes its own target audience. Players who choose system openings are called 'not very ambitious'. That is a pejorative judgement. A player who chooses the London System is not necessarily unambitious. He is simply weighing the opportunity cost between memorisation and understanding the game. A product that wants to sell to this group while disparaging this group has not understood its customer. So what is the genuinely interesting point here? The genuinely interesting point is not the London System or the Trompowsky. Those openings have existed for decades, and their practical value at club level has long been proven. The interesting point is how a content industry operates around a perceptual gap. The theory tax is real. The fear of being lost in the opening is real. And the market will always have someone offering a solution — however deep that solution is, however verified, and whoever's name it is attached to. What I want the reader to take away is not a list of openings, but a habit of verification. When you read a promise of a plan, ask: on how many games was that plan tested, against how many opponents, at what rating level. When you see a title naming a person, scroll down to check whether that person actually appears in the content. When you see a flashy number without a source, assume it is unverified until someone verifies it. I never say a course is worthless just because its sales pitch exaggerates. I say a course is worth exactly as much as its ability to withstand scrutiny. With six videos across more than eight openings, with a taxonomy that does not match its own frame, and with a title that misattributes a name, I will look up every plan again before using any of them in a real game. And I leave one question for the next round of tracking. If the theory tax keeps pushing players out of mainstream openings, where will the rest of the chess content industry go — deeper into analysis, or broader into packaging? I have a feeling the real game is not on the board, but in the place where people decide what to sell you before you play your first move. I will record the next games and cross-check. The only way to know whether a plan is real is to take it into battle.