Six Videos for Seven Opening Systems: What the Anti-London Instruction Market Is Actually Selling

I stayed behind after the fourth game of an open tournament in Shenzhen and went back over the scoresheet. My opponent, a club player rated around 1850, had played exactly as he did in the previous three rounds: 1.d4, 2.Nf3, 3.Bf4, 4.e3, 5.Bd3, 6.Nbd2. He spent under two minutes on those six moves. Four games in a row I had to build a middlegame plan out of nothing, while he simply repeated something he already knew by heart. That is the entire commercial logic of the opening-instruction market, compressed into a single afternoon. It is also why I read the announcement of IM Valeri Lilov's "Power of Initiative" series carefully: six videos, a Bulgarian trainer, and a subject that is Black's defensive systems against the openings White uses to sidestep the heaviest theory of 1.d4 d5. After 1.d4 d5, the largest body of theory sits in the 2.c4 branch. The Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen's Gambit Accepted, the Orthodox Queen's Gambit — four families with thousands of pages of analysis, dozens of main lines updated by engine patches, and a memorisation cost most club players refuse to pay. Between roughly 1400 and 2026 Elo, White usually takes the cheaper road: no 2.c4. They switch to the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the London System, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov. For a Black player preparing seriously, this is asymmetric warfare. You spend six months on the Slav and the Semi-Slav, then walk into a tournament where nobody plays them against you. During seven years commentating on chess for VTC, I saw one thing clearly that no variation table ever shows: the gap between what is prepared and what reaches the board. Systems like the London and the Colle are not strong because they are sharp. They are strong because they force the opponent to think in a region of the board he has never mapped. According to the promotional material, Lilov offers a practical plan for each system: pawn structure, key squares, move orders. Six videos for seven openings. That ratio tells most of the story by itself. Walk through the systems to see the problem Black has to solve. The Colle System, with Nf3, e3, Bd3 and 0-0, is a hypermodern setup built with pieces rather than pawns. White is not asking for space; White is asking for a stable centre and then a kingside expansion. Black lives or dies on the timing of ...e5 or ...c5: play it at the right moment and White runs short of space, play it one move late and White is comfortable. The London System brings the bishop to f4 before locking the e3-d4 pawn chain. It is solid, hard to lose, and for exactly that reason hard to win. Black's problem is not being attacked, but being forced to generate the play himself while White offers no lever. The Trompowsky Attack is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5, hitting f6 directly to damage Black's pawn structure before Black can explain what he wants. The Torre Attack runs Nf3, Bg5, e3 and often transposes into other structures when it is convenient. The Richter-Veresov uses Nc3 and Bg5. The Catalan puts the bishop on g2 along the long diagonal and applies queenside pressure for thirty moves. The Blackmar-Diemer Gambit sacrifices a pawn for the centre and open files. What the seven systems share: they develop first and argue later. None of them requires White to remember precisely to move twenty. They only require White to know which pawn structure he wants. For Black, the corresponding answer does not lie in a novelty either — it lies in the middlegame plan: trade the right pawns, open the right file, place the pieces on the right squares. That is what a "practical plans" course can supply, and it is also the hardest kind of content to evaluate, because its correctness depends on the whole system behind it rather than on any single move. One detail in the title deserves more attention than the rest: the phrase "Benko Gambit". The Benko Gambit arises after 1.d4 Nf5, an entirely different branch with no logical connection to the Colle, the Trompowsky or the London. That is a search-engine decision, not a technical one. It took me three months to learn that a beautiful chart is no substitute for a correct process — a lesson that arrived after I called the 2026 World Cup wrong and had to sit through all 48 group-stage matches again to understand how badly I had ignored pressure-conversion metrics. The promotional text calls these systems "extremely dangerous". That is sales language, not a technical assessment. The London System is solid but unambitious. The Colle System is regarded as somewhat passive at elite level. The Torre Attack usually leads to strategically neutral positions. The real danger level depends almost entirely on the quality of Black's preparation, not on the nature of the opening. And there is a larger data gap: the announcement publishes no rating for the instructor, no student results, no sample content, no win rates, no engine evaluation. Buyers are asked to trust a name and the label "Episode 21" of a series. When the data does not lie, we are the ones lying to ourselves. A Chinese club taught me that data is not the destination, but a walking stick. In 2026, analysing Luis Fabiano's output at Tianjin Quanjian, I found that his 22 Chinese Super League goals came with an efficiency 18 percent below expectation, driven by an over-reliance on set pieces. The club changed its attacking approach. The lesson was not in the number but in the fact that a number has to answer a specific question. For an opening course, the specific question is: where does Black put his pieces after move twelve. Without sample content, a buyer cannot answer it. The IM-level opening course market is saturated. Every system on that list has free analysis on YouTube and on public analysis platforms. The differentiation of a product like this lies in presentation structure, not in new content. And structure is something you can only verify after paying. The thing worth tracking is not this particular course. It is whether the market keeps pricing a six-video package covering seven systems on a par with a deep repertoire on a single one. Data is a mirror; but only the person willing to face himself sees the truth. On the board, the London player in round four will still move within two minutes.