Seven Bypasses Around 1.d4 d5: IM Valeri Lilov and Black's Defensive Problem

The bishop landed on f4. Wood against wood, a short dry click, like a door closing.

It was the third game of a Thursday evening at a small club tucked down an alley off Nguyen Chi Thanh Street in Da Nang. White was an engineer in his forties who plays chess "one hour a week". He had just completed the pattern he has repeated more times than anyone can count: pawn d4, bishop f4, pawn e3, knight f3, bishop d3, knight bd2, pawn c3. He did not need to think. He only needed to remember.

Across the board sat the club's strongest opening expert. He knows the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Orthodox Queen's Gambit, the Queen's Gambit Accepted, down to the last dot. But White did not play c4. By move fifteen his face carried the expression I have seen hundreds of times in forty years beside a chessboard: a man with an entire library in his head who cannot find the right book to open.

Twenty minutes later, Black lost. Not to a tactic. To the absence of a plan.

The next morning I came across a training product called "Power of Initiative", Episode 21, by IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. Six videos. Seven opening systems. And a name in the title that made me stop: the Benko Gambit.

A century of theory, and one way around it

For more than a hundred years, the conversation that begins with 1.d4 d5 has been shaped by four enormous theoretical blocks. White plays 2.c4, and depending on Black's reply the game branches into one of four worlds: the Slav Defence (2...c6), the Semi-Slav (2...c6, 3.Nf3 Nf6, 4.Nc3 e6), the Queen's Gambit Accepted (2...dxc4), and the Orthodox Queen's Gambit (2...e6). Each of those worlds has been dissected out to move thirty, with hundreds of thousands of database games and a current of theory that never stops flowing.

Amateur players do not die of too little information. They die of too much.

A club player has two hours a week for chess. Spend both on the Semi-Slav and you master one branch and lose to the other. So a large share of White players between 1400 and 2026 Elo choose the economically rational escape: they do not play 2.c4.

They turn to the Colle, the Trompowsky, the Torre, the London, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer and the Richter-Veresov. Seven systems, seven doors around the theoretical forest. Objectively, none of them is stronger than the Orthodox Queen's Gambit. But they own one advantage no amount of theory can buy: they force the opponent to think.

And when the opponent has to think, the rating gap shrinks.

Seven doors, and what waits behind them

Colle. 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3 e6 4.Bd3 c5 5.c3. White builds a tidy pyramid and looks for the e4 push. Black's plan is simpler than it looks: control e4 with pieces, not pawns. A knight on e4, a bishop on d6 to trade off the d3 bishop, and a well-timed c5 are enough to drain White's setup of life.

Trompowsky. 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5. This is a structural attack. White forces Black to choose between ...Ne4 and ...d5, and both concede something. Black must choose first, and choose correctly. The difference between a good and a bad position here is often one move.

Torre. 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Bg5. This system lives by transposition. Depending on Black's answer it becomes a London, a Trompowsky, or an improved Colle. You cannot memorise the Torre the way you memorise a Slav line, because the Torre is not a line. It is a junction.

London. 1.d4 d5 2.Bf4. This is the busiest door and the most underrated one. The familiar setup — Nf3, e3, Bd3, Nbd2, c3, then h3 and g4 — produces a structure that is nearly impossible for Black to crack. Black has two big jobs: neutralise the f4 bishop (with ...Bd6, with ...Nh5, or with ...g6 and ...Bg7) and find central counterplay with ...c5 before White completes development. Let White take nine free moves and Black will be playing a game in which every road leads somewhere slightly unpleasant.

Catalan. 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2. The only system here that still requires 2.c4, and therefore the heaviest. White accepts a slow tempo in exchange for long-term pressure on the long diagonal. Black survives by keeping a clean pawn structure and finding a way to trade the g2 bishop.

Blackmar-Diemer. 1.d4 d5 2.e4 dxe4 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.f3. A pure gamble. White sacrifices a pawn to open the f-file and the centre. Against the unprepared it wins by surprise. Against the prepared it is simply a slightly better game for Black that is not easy to win.

Richter-Veresov. 1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bg5. A rare system, sometimes dismissed as unserious, and annoying precisely because it is rare.

Black's common thread

Seven doors, but only one question: who controls e4?

Based on my experience following games at international and domestic events, most Black defeats against this family do not come from forgotten variations. They come from conceding e4 too early. The Colle lives on e4. The London lives on e4. The Torre lives on e4. Even the Richter-Veresov lives on e4. The moment Black plants a knight on e4, or retains the ability to dislodge White's knight from e5, all seven systems turn suddenly gentle.

The second thing is move order. In this family White usually plays irreversible moves inside the first ten: the f4 bishop leaves the back rank, the e3 pawn locks in the c1 bishop, the c3 pawn takes c3 away from the knight. Every such move is a commitment. Black's task is to make those commitments cost more than they should.

The third, and least discussed, is the pawn structure once the c-file opens. In the games I have sat through, a pattern repeats: Black wins not with a flaming counterattack but by keeping one pawn alive on the board at the right moment in the endgame. The death of a bypass opening usually arrives at move forty, not move fifteen.

The market for plans

The chess instruction market has changed completely in fifteen years. People used to buy books, and books taught principles. Now people buy courses, and courses teach lines. The big online platforms have trained consumers to expect machine-analysed repertoires with clean trees and per-move evaluations. The boundary between understanding and memorising has grown thin, and most buyers do not notice which one they are paying for.

Against that backdrop, six videos spread across seven systems says a great deal. That is less than one video per system. The Colle, the London and the Torre can each run to hundreds of pages if you want to go all the way. Structurally, this product cannot be a complete theoretical repertoire. It is an orientation kit.

Orientation has its own value. A 1600-rated player does not need move twenty-three of a rare Catalan line. He needs to know where the knight goes once White has finished setting up. But orientation has limits: it teaches you to walk the right road on the map, not to draw a new map when the road is blocked. And in this family, the road is always blocked around move fifteen.

The word "dangerous"

Lilov calls these systems "extremely dangerous". I want to split that word in two.

The first meaning is marketing, and it works. A course that wants to sell must convince the buyer that the opponent is holding a weapon. That pressure is real, but it is psychological, not positional. Objectively, the London System is not a dangerous opening. It is a safe one. The Colle is not dangerous; it is cautious, and at various points in history it has been considered slightly passive. Calling these as dangerous as the Orthodox Queen's Gambit goes beyond the data.

The second meaning is the true one, and it is subtler: they are dangerous because they force the opponent to think. An 1800 player using the London will not beat an international master. But he will beat a 1850 player who knows eighteen moves of the Semi-Slav by heart — because on move nineteen, the memoriser has to think for the first time all day, while the London player has been thinking since move two.

There is a collective blind spot worth naming. The chess world remembers vividly the games in which small systems were crushed: a Colle demolished in twenty-five moves, a London ripped open by ...g5. We remember the tragedies. We do not remember the hundreds of slow draws in which White lost nothing. Collective memory tilts toward the spectacular; reality tilts toward the effective.

And there is one more thing about the product itself. The Benko Gambit in the title does not match the listed content. The Benko Gambit begins 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 b5, a system in which Black sacrifices a pawn for activity on both wings. None of the seven openings named in the course transposes naturally into the Benko. The only bridge between them is the name, and the name is very easy to search for. That is a familiar marketing device in chess content, not a technical statement.

About the instructor

The description stops at two words for IM Valeri Lilov: Bulgarian trainer. No current rating, no cited tournament record, no named students. For a training product that is a notable gap — buyers are asked to trust a reputation they have no way to verify from the sales material itself. In this market, international-master instructors typically serve the 1400 to 2026 range and serve it well. That is a reasonable price for a stable level of quality. It is not the level intended for players preparing elite tournaments, and buyers should know where they stand before they pay.

Between silence and a plan

Back to the game in Da Nang.

Black that evening did not lack knowledge. He lacked a question. Throughout the game he played ...e6, then ...Bd6, then ...Nbd7, each move reasonable if judged alone. But none of them answered the question: what neutralises the f4 bishop, and when?

That is the entire content of defending against bypass openings. Not memorising lines. Not recalling moves. It is asking the right question one tempo before your opponent does.

A six-video course can teach that question for seven different systems. It can teach it well enough that a club player no longer sits frozen at the board like a stranger in his own library. But it cannot answer the question for you, in positions no book on earth has ever printed.

When a course promises seven openings in six videos, the real question is not whether the course is good enough. The real question is whether, after watching it, you can ask your first question when the clock shows fifteen minutes and the opponent has just placed a bishop on f4.

If you can, you no longer need a course. If you cannot, ten more episodes will not help.