A King's Indian DVD Sells 9...a5 as a Bayonet Antidote: Sound Technique, Skewed Packaging

The product page for a King's Indian opening DVD ends its first sentence at the move 7.O-O and opens its second at 9.b4. Between those two sentences the board is missing two moves: 7...Nc6 and 8.d5 Ne7. Nobody reaches 9.b4 without them. Anyone writing for a player who intends to sit down at the board would not drop the connecting moves, because those two moves decide whether the position exists at all. Someone writing for a buyer can drop them, because the buyer has not sat down yet. I noted this before reading anything else, following a habit formed in 2026, when the security at Sree Kanteerava stadium refused me entry to the press room and I had to take notes from the corridor. Pushed into the AFC Cup 2026 hallway, I learned to read matches from what others leave behind. In this product page, what was left behind is two moves.

The product presents itself as an antidote to the Bayonet Attack in the King's Indian, built around a single move: 9...a5. The promise has three layers. First, escape the theoretical bulk of the main line 9...Nh5. Second, drag the opponent into territory the computer does not understand. Third, give the player the right to think instead of memorize. All three are written in a confident voice, and none carries a line of data. No author name, no title, no publication date, no sample games, no engine assessment, no game count from any database. For an opening instruction product, that is a list of omissions, not a minimal design.

The Bayonet sits inside the Mar del Plata branch of the King's Indian: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 O-O 6.Be2 e5 7.O-O Nc6 8.d5 Ne7, and then 9.b4. The move 9.b4 is an undisguised statement: White is not offering a draw, White opens a front on the queenside, pushes a pawn for space, prepares b5 and Ba3, and threatens to trade on d5 on favourable terms. Black in this branch usually accepts a cramped position, concedes space, and looks for counterplay on the kingside or in the centre. Anyone who has played Black in the Mar del Plata knows the feeling: the board contracts, the pieces have no squares, and every move has to be calculated from memory rather than from instinct.

The main line 9...Nh5 is the standard answer. It brings the knight into the ring around the king, prepares f5, and opens a long chain of variations reaching move 20 or 25 that both sides must know. The theoretical load here is large enough that a club player with a normal working schedule cannot keep up. That is the pain point the product page targets, and it targets it precisely. The intended buyer is not the player being outplayed positionally; it is the player being beaten because the opponent arrived with a prepared file and they did not.

The move 9...a5 does exactly what the page says at the mechanical level. It strikes at the b4 pawn and forces White to decide immediately: push b5 and the queenside locks with a fixed target for Black, or trade on b4 and Black opens the a-file for a rook while settling into a more balanced structure. Both choices pull the game out of the forcing zone and into the adjusting zone, where each move is valued by positional judgement rather than by the length of a line. That is a real transformation, and I do not deny it. The problem is the label attached to it.

The move 9...a5 does not create an objective advantage; it reduces the variance of preparation cost — and that is a practical benefit of an entirely different kind from an improvement in the position. The page sells the first by using the language of the second. The player buys for the right reason but is promised a wrong one. The difference is not academic: if you believe you hold the better position, you play to win with the position; if you know you hold a balanced position with fewer lines, you play to win with time and preparation. Two different psychological strategies, two different ways of handling the clock.

Not a single figure appears anywhere in the page. No engine assessment, no ACPL, no game count, no win rate, no game by a named grandmaster. In professional opening analysis, that absence is itself data: the text was written to persuade, not to be checked. On sophistication, 9...a5 is a known low-frequency sideline, not a new idea. The page calls it an antidote rather than an invention — a more honest label than the surface suggests.

The weakest claim is that computers do not understand these positions. That is a claim from a period that has ended. Since neural evaluation and NNUE became standard — Stockfish 12 onward, from 2026 — and with the maturation of Leela-style engines, closed strategic positions are no longer a blind spot at the level the page implies. The surviving argument is far narrower and quite different: in positions after 9...a5 there are fewer forcing lines to memorize, so the human-versus-engine gap is a memory gap, not an understanding gap. White's analysis team can still check that position in fifteen minutes; what they cannot do is make the opponent remember it for them.

The claim that objectively the chances are equal is presented as fact, with no assessment, no game reference, no database citation. In practice the Mar del Plata structure gives White durable space and a queenside majority plan while Black plays for the initiative and accepts risk. That is a high-variance balance, not a symmetric equality. The statement may be approximately true at engine depth, but it is asserted without evidence, so I mark it unverified rather than false.

Two technical gaps matter more than the rest. First, the refutation front is entirely absent: b5, Ba3 and Nd2 are White's natural replies and the ground on which the buyer will be tested, yet the page discusses none of them. Second, the half-life of the surprise is never quantified. A rarely played sideline is worth something only until the opponent has prepared; its useful life runs inversely to how often it appears, and every public game shortens it a little further. The seller knows this. The buyer is not told.

Split by rating, the practical value of 9...a5 is uneven. Below 2026, opponents rarely reach a prepared Bayonet, so strategic guidance beats memorized theory and utility is medium to high. Between 2026 and 2400 is the peak: opponents do prepare main lines, and a rare move in exactly this band produces the largest surprise dividend. Above 2400 the value drops to medium-low, because opponents and their seconds already have the move in their files, the rarity advantage collapses, and the main line 9...Nh5 reasserts itself. Put differently, the product is strongest in the band whose players are most likely to be caught out fastest.

No player is named, no author title is given, no grandmaster game is shown, no testimonial appears. In the opening-instruction genre the minimum standard is an author name with a title and a few sample games. Missing all three, the buyer has no way to judge style fit — the single most important variable in whether an opening product works for a specific person. That is an information gap, not a neutral choice.

The counterintuitive angle: what is being sold here is not a move but a reallocation of the memory budget. A King's Indian player has two finite resources, preparation hours and lines they can hold. The move 9...a5 trades the second for the first — it demands fewer lines but more in-game judgement. For someone with little preparation time, that is a good deal. For someone with plenty of preparation time but weak positional judgement, it is a bad deal packaged as a good one. And there is a paradox built into the promise of thinking instead of memorizing: it promises time to precisely the group with the least time in their day.

Fourteen years commentating chess for VTC taught me one thing about promises of this kind. People rarely lose because they lack an unusual move; they lose because they do not know how their unusual move will be answered on move ten. I believe in formations, but I believe more in the gaps between formations. And the person standing at the edge of the pitch sees the whole match, not just what is inside the goal — here, the edge of the pitch is the two moves dropped from the opening paragraph, and the goal is the move 9...a5 printed in bold on the sales page. There was no seat for me in the press room. Tactical history always has one. That history records the moves nobody advertised.

The test lies in the next game, not on the product page. Take Black, wait for the opponent to play 10.Ba3 or push b5, record the time you spend finding a reply, then compare it with the time you once spent on a 9...Nh5 line you already knew. If the difference is positive, the product has done its job, whatever the advertising says. If it is negative, you have bought a map of territory nobody has finished surveying. The remaining question belongs to the seller: after your tenth game, who exactly is 9...a5 still a secret from?