The Echo of Nameless Openings

On a November evening, I sat before my screen and read a headline: David Antón Guijarro took the sole lead at Legends & Prodigies. My finger paused on the keyboard — the old reflex of a man who once held the pieces, once organized tournaments, once waited for the results of games no one streamed. I clicked, expecting a game, a scoresheet, a moment. The page opened. No moves. No position. No standings. Only six videos, eleven openings, and an invitation to buy a course: what Black should play against the opening systems White chooses to avoid theory. I sat still. A disappearance does not need an explosion. It is only a quiet swap — between what people tell and what people sell. I came to chess before I came to writing. In 2026 I was both an amateur player and the organizer of a few small tournaments in Saigon clubs — where the stands were often empty, the organizing committee usually numbered three, and the prizes were sometimes just a wooden chess set. From there I moved into chess media. Eleven years of watching this industry change taught me one thing: chess does not disappear. It only moves from the board to the screen, from the stands to websites selling courses. Legends & Prodigies is a name worth pausing over. It joins two words organizers love: “legends” and “prodigies.” In an ordinary open, you sell the tension of the standings. In an event named like this, you sell a story: one generation passing the flame to the next. It is a familiar formula — mixing veterans with young faces, placing them side by side so the audience can tell itself a story about time. And when a tournament is named like a story, its result is often just a pretext to keep the story going. David Antón Guijarro, born in 2026, sits exactly between those two words. Not old enough to be a legend, not young enough to be a prodigy. He belongs to the squeezed middle generation — people who must find their own place in a chess world where the spotlight usually falls on the two extremes of age. His taking the sole lead in such an event is a result worth telling: it says that generation is still here, still playing, still winning. It says that between legend and prodigy there is a gap we rarely see — and in that gap, games are still played, quietly, good enough to be remembered. But the story is not about him. In another corner stands someone less mentioned: IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer, author of the course the page promotes. Lilov is not a grandmaster. He stands on the second rung of the title ladder — good enough to teach, not famous enough to be invited to an event called Legends & Prodigies. But it is he, not Antón, who is the true character of that story. And before I go into six videos and eleven openings, I need to explain why such a thing can happen: why a real tournament result is used as a doorway into an unrelated product. Technically, Lilov’s course touches a real pain. Any player who takes Black and invests seriously in the Slav, Semi-Slav, or Queen’s Gambit Declined knows the feeling: the opponent refuses to play 2.c4. Instead of entering the theory-dense path both sides prepared for hundreds of hours, White chooses a different system — London, Colle, Trompowsky, Torre — where theory is thinner, the pace slower, and Black must suddenly think instead of remember. That is the “anti-theory cluster.” The name sounds gentle, but it strikes a paradox of modern chess: the better you prepare, the more easily you get stuck when the opponent leaves the familiar road. Start with the London System, the most familiar of the group. White builds a pyramid: d4, Nf3, Bf4, e3, Bd3, c3, Nbd2. Nothing strange. No immediate threat. But nothing for Black to attack either. The game drifts into a position where White needs to remember nothing at all, only to understand one plan: develop, keep the structure, wait for Black to err. The London is not a killing weapon. It is a way of telling your opponent: “I will not lose because of theory.” The Colle System is similar but humbler: 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3. White hides the intent, builds e3 then Bd3, waiting for the chance to play e4. It is an opening of patience, a game played by waiting — and waiting is an art many young players no longer have the patience to learn. The Trompowsky Attack (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5) is different. Here White is proactive, pushing the bishop out on move two, forcing Black to think about pawn structure before developing. The Torre Attack (1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Bg5) is Trompowsky’s brother — slower, tighter, but with the same spirit: sowing doubt from the start. What all four share is clear: they do not ask White to remember much. They ask White to understand one plan. And that is exactly why they annoy Black — not because they are strong, but because they strip Black of his strongest weapon: preparation. To see why, compare with the orthodox path. If White plays 2.c4, the game enters one of chess’s densest theoretical territories: the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen’s Gambit Accepted, the Orthodox Queen’s Gambit Declined. There, by move fifteen or twenty, both sides may still be following lines analyzed to the end. Both know where they are, where they are going, and what they will face. It is a war of memory. The Slav (1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6) lets Black hold d5 with ...c6, develop the bishop to f5, and build a durable structure. The Semi-Slav adds ...e6, opening ultra-complex lines like Moscow and Botvinnik. The Queen’s Gambit Accepted (2...dxc4) temporarily cedes the center for rapid development. The Orthodox Queen’s Gambit Declined (2...e6) is classical solidity, where both sides understand what they are entering. All four demand a massive memory load and reward the one who remembers over the one who thinks. The serious Black player invests in them. Then the opponent plays the London. And the whole theoretical archive becomes useless — not because it is wrong, but because it is unused. That is the real pain Lilov’s course aims at, and in that respect it is entirely legitimate. But then I read the course description closely. And I found a paradox. On the same page, in the same voice, the author writes two seemingly exclusive things. On one hand, he calls this anti-theory cluster “not very ambitious” — meaning White achieves little theoretically, just plays safe. On the other, he calls it “extremely dangerous” — meaning to Black it is a major threat. Both can be true, but only in a narrow sense: these systems are drawish and low-risk for White, yet troublesome for Black because Black loses the initiative in preparation. The problem is that in a course’s marketing, “solid” gets inflated into “dangerous,” “safe” becomes “lethal.” That is a sign of sales language, not technical assessment. And I noticed this not by analyzing moves — but by noticing how the words were chosen. One number made me pause longer: six videos, eleven openings. Six divided by eleven gives about half a video per opening. A deep course on the London System alone usually needs six to fifteen videos. Here, the Catalan — an entirely different system, fianchetto-based, aimed at the queenside, slow and deep — shares a course with the Richter-Veresov and the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, offbeat, risky openings. The breadth sounds appealing on a title, but it says the opposite about depth. That is the arithmetic of spreading thin: the more topics, the shallower each. A buyer expecting full equipment may receive a map, not a compass. A map tells you what lands exist. A compass teaches you to cross them. The core here is not the opening. The core is this: a product sold by borrowing the prestige of a person who has nothing to do with it. The headline says Antón. The body says Lilov. The reader is led from a tournament result to a sales page, with no logical thread between them. I imagined an ordinary reader clicking. They are curious about Antón. They want to know whom he beat, how, what the game looked like. Three minutes later, they are reading about how Black fights the London System. That is not a redirect. It is a deception. And this is where the story leaves the board. In years of reporting tournaments in Saigon, I have realized one thing: chess stands are not empty because people do not love chess. They are empty because chess is not sold as a sport, but as a skill. A good game earns no money. A course does. And when money flows toward courses, people start using the very games that are good as bait. An empty stand still echoes — if only we are quiet enough to hear. And what I hear in this story is not the sound of pieces, but of an economy quietly rewriting how we talk about chess. Look at the income structure of professional chess. At the very top, a few dozen people live on prizes, sponsorships, and appearance fees. Below, thousands of players — including IMs like Lilov — cannot live on prizes. For them, becoming a course author is not an aesthetic choice but an economic one. The “trainer-as-author” model is not an isolated phenomenon. It is how chess pays its middle tier — by letting them fend for themselves. This matters because it shifts responsibility. Lilov himself may write a good or bad course. But the way he must sell it — with a headline borrowing another’s name — is not his decision. The system decides it. When a trainer cannot live from teaching alone, the system forces him to become a marketer. And a marketer optimizes for the click, not the truth. Here I want to push back on an easy reflex: blaming Lilov. No. The trainer is only doing what chess’s economic system forces him to do. If we want to find who is responsible, we must look at the structure, not the individual. But there is something more counterintuitive. We usually think the anti-theory cluster is Black’s problem — an annoyance Black must solve. In truth it is likely the reverse: it is a mirror held up to the state of modern opening theory. The London System is not White’s weakness. It is a judgment on theory. When a system requiring no memory can still hold a player who prepared for hundreds of hours, the problem is not that system — it is that theory has swollen so much that “not playing theory” has become a rational strategy. The anti-theory cluster is the shadow orthodox theory casts on itself. It exists because theory exists — and because theory has grown too heavy to carry. A child playing the Colle is not lazy. They are someone who realized you do not need to know everything to play decent chess. This leads me to another thought about that headline. Looked at closely, it is not merely a media trick. It is a symptom of the same disease. Both the anti-theory cluster and the borrowed-name headline are ways of slipping around an overlarge system. One slips around theory. The other around reputation. Both say: when the orthodox road grows too long, people take detours. And this is what I want to say about David Antón. He is the one whose name was borrowed, but he does not know it, and likely does not care. He is at a tournament, holding the sole lead, living the moment every player longs for. Meanwhile his name is used to sell something he has nothing to do with. That is a small paradox of our age: the better a player performs, the more easily their name is separated from their own game. I do not know whether Antón will win that event. I do not know whether Lilov’s course is good. But I know one thing: between those two men, a game disappeared — the game I should have been reading, the game that took Antón to the top. It was replaced by a sales page, and I wonder how many other games are being replaced like that, every day, on every chess site I still read. The true death of a game is not when it ends. It is when no one retells it. And if tomorrow, at some tournament, a player of the squeezed middle generation wins a beautiful game — will people write about that game, or use his name to sell a course on how to defend against it? I leave that question there, among pieces that were never named. Generations of players will pass, but the poem about them keeps being written — as long as someone is willing to sit and read.