Lilov's Six Opening Videos: Usable Technique, Unverifiable Trust

The game took place in a small club in eastern Chengdu, on a Saturday evening where the entry fee was thirty yuan. White played 1.d4, then 2.Bf4. Black — a man of about fifty, thin-rimmed glasses, hand already resting on the clock — thought for eleven minutes about his fourth move. I sat two metres away, stopwatch running, logging every turn. He was not calculating. He was trying to recall a plan someone had once told him, and failing. On move 31 he signed the scoresheet, stood up, and said: "I know I went wrong. I just don't know where."

That night I entered the game into my spreadsheet. The spreadsheet began in 2026 and now holds 2,400 games. Everything on a field is data waiting to be read — if you are willing to sit down. So is a chessboard.

The article I am decoding belongs to a different market: opening-instruction content. At its centre is IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian International Master, who has released a six-video course teaching Black how to meet the group professionals call "non-critical d4": the London System, Colle System, Torre Attack, Trompowsky Attack, Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and Richter-Veresov.

The reason the course exists is concrete. At club level, many White players skip 2.c4 — the move that opens the heavy theory of the Slav, Semi-Slav, Queen's Gambit Accepted and Queen's Gambit Declined. They choose structure-based systems instead: a few fixed opening moves, the middlegame decided later. The phenomenon is real, and no sales campaign invented it. The so-called theory tax pushes amateurs off the main lines, and once they leave, they open a gap: Black has nothing to hold on to.

That gap is what the course targets. And it is where I want to cut with data, not with enthusiasm.

London, Colle, Torre and Trompowsky really are unpleasant at club level, but in a different way than the source describes. They are not theoretically strong — they are strong because Black lacks a plan. White builds a stable structure around Nf3, e3, Bd3, c3 and Bf4 depending on the variation, then quietly declares: your turn to solve it. Black, who spent all his preparation time on 2.c4, has to think from move five.

When the source calls these openings "extremely dangerous", that is sales language. There is no ACPL — average centipawn loss per move against an engine. No win, draw and loss rates. Not a single sample game. I am not denying the practical usefulness of the material; I am saying it has not been quantified. A tactical claim without numbers stays a hypothesis, even when the speaker is an International Master.

Six videos across seven systems. That format forces breadth: each opening gets a plan, not a complete theoretical system. For a club player that may be enough. For anyone above 2026, it is a starting point, not a destination.

One technical detail made me pause longer than the rest. The source frames everything around 1.d4 d5. But the Trompowsky Attack is 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 — it never passes through 1...d5. Same for the Torre: 1.d4 Nf6, then Nf3 and Bg5, with Black not necessarily playing d5 at all. And the Catalan, listed in the syllabus, begins with 2.c4 — precisely the move said to be avoided. The source's taxonomy is looser than a serious opening lecture should be. That is a small but telling signal: the content is organised to sell, not to systematise.

I still time club games move by move in Chengdu. Over the years the pattern I find is not which opening White picks, but how long Black takes before his first meaningful decision. In games where Black had a pre-written plan, that window dropped below two minutes. Where Black had to think from scratch, it jumped to seven or eight. The clock in the middlegame is what pays for missing theory. That is the real value of a product like Lilov's course: it does not teach you to win, it teaches you to save time.

On the instructor's authority: IM — International Master — is the second-highest title in the FIDE system, below Grandmaster. An IM is fully qualified to coach club and intermediate players. The source supplies no rating, no tournament record, no coaching résumé. That does not make the material wrong. It only means the authority has to be verified independently.

The most notable thing about this document is not on the board.

The headline is an interview with Timur Turlov. Across every extracted information point, Turlov never appears. The person who appears is Lilov. And Lilov is absent from the headline. Several data points are plainly labelled: no source.

Professionally, that is a heavier fault than any opening error. A reader clicks expecting a conversation with a financier linked to chess sponsorship, and receives a product page. Two subjects, two purposes, one headline. For me that is enough to downgrade the entire document to "advertising pending verification", however neatly the technical section is written.

Transfers are the one place people pay for hope and then blame time. The opening-course market runs on exactly that formula. You pay, you receive a video file, and every error on move 31 belongs to you, not the seller. The source gives me no data to separate a good product from a well-advertised one.

I no longer believe in miracles on the field; I believe in chance-conversion rates. On a chessboard that rate is measured by the time saved in the first ten moves and by the number of games rescued from a difficult middlegame. A course that proves both with data, I will read. A course that only promises, I file under "pending verification" — and leave it there.