9...a5: A DVD Against the Bayonet, and the Uneven Preparation in Our Chess Rooms

The steel cupboard in the Purana Paltan federation hall still holds the 2026 norm sheet, a dried coffee ring sitting over the black queen's square. In 2026, the year my magazine killed its print run and opened a digital desk, I spent four days in that room and came out writing about a grandmaster whose name made a 21-year-old reader comment three words: "Who is Niaz?" The steel cupboard still holds the echo of a crowd that never came.

Last week a different object reached my Khulna desk. A promotional write-up for a King's Indian Defence repertoire DVD, arranged in sixteen numbered points. In sixteen points there is not one game, not one opponent's name, not one rating, not one engine evaluation. Only one promise: 9...a5.

The game first. The King's Indian gives Black the centre early, then attacks it with a clamp. Its sharpest classical form is the Mar del Plata: Black plays ...Nc6 and ...Ne7, storms the kingside with ...f5, and White takes space on the queenside. The Bayonet, 9.b4, is White's answer — the b-pawn advances two squares, presses on Black's queenside structure, controls the ...Nc5 square, and slows the ...f5-...f4 plan. The principal reply is 9...Nh5: forcing, sharp, and so engine-driven that club players end up memorising rather than playing.

The DVD proposes 9...a5 instead. Less forcing, more strategic, and in the blurb's own words a position where "computers often do not know how to handle" the resulting complexity. The same blurb concedes that after the main line 9...Nh5, "computer analysis is important again." Read together, the product being sold is comfort, not analysis.

What does 9...a5 actually do? It delays Black's kingside storm and settles the queenside structure first. The move questions the base of the b4 pawn, makes the b5 square less comfortable for White, and prepares the ...Nc5 route. If White charges on the kingside, Black answers calmly. The value of a move like this lies not in objective advantage but in preparation asymmetry. A White player who has memorised twenty-five branches of 9...Nh5 must now stop and think. The clock does not pay for thinking.

The claim that computers cannot handle these positions no longer holds. NNUE-based Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero play slow, stable, strategic maneuvering better than humans do, and the King's Indian in particular has become clearer to engines as depth increased. A statement that was debatable twenty years ago is simply marketing in the current engine era. The DVD's own logic points elsewhere: the 9...a5 lines are less forcing, therefore less engine-decisive — a claim about human practical difficulty, not machine incapacity.

The blurb also says the position is "objectively equal" and simultaneously "dangerous for White." Both can be true in one sense only: equal on the board, not in the head. That is the oldest sales line in opening literature, and it is doing the work here.

The money board deserves opening. A DVD or downloadable repertoire costs a European buyer roughly one month of club coaching; for a student in Khulna it costs two months of individual lessons. In the era of interactive platforms the disc itself is a legacy business model, and the "understand, don't memorise" pitch sells to a durable adult-improver market. It was never built for a junior pipeline.

In our context the point sharpens. Engine access is not Bangladesh's shortage; Stockfish runs on a 2026 laptop. The shortage is coaching hours, home norm tournaments, and the school pipeline that died after 2026. No fifth grandmaster since 2026 is a sponsorship vacuum, not an excess of silicon.

Here sits the blind spot in our collective memory. We love the "human understanding versus machine memory" story because it comforts us — it locates the problem outside our rooms. Chess in our rooms did not stop because of computers; it stopped because there were no rooms. Treating 9...a5 as a repertoire pillar is a mistake; it is a surprise weapon, it works once, and then the opponent prepares. Those who understand the difference buy a clock, not a disc.

Fashion will turn. The Bayonet will return to the main line and drift away again, and the cupboard will still hold the disc, the way it holds the coffee ring over the black queen's square. Forty squares, no crowd: the board remembers what the terraces forgot. The question is not about the DVD. It is about the room. When a twelve-year-old in a Dhaka junior hall refuses a draw and plays on for two more hours, will there be a room waiting — or only a disc and a switched-off phone?