A Course Sold in Saint Louis's Name: The Gap Between Chess News and Chess Advertising

At 1 a.m., the thing that lights up a phone screen is rarely the result. It is usually a link. That night the link said Clutch Chess in Saint Louis, and beneath it, four names: Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Javokhir Sindarov, R. Praggnanandhaa. I opened the tab, reached for my tea, and scrolled. Three paragraphs went by before I registered that there was no board anywhere. No move, no clock, no score. What there was instead: six videos and the name of a Bulgarian trainer, IM Valeri Lilov.

The stadium that night was a phone screen and a prayer — except this time the screen held no match, only a sales page. I sat there for a while, unsure whether to be annoyed or amused. Then the old habit kicked in: look at the room first, the result later. The room was a night, a screen, a tab still open, and a headline that had promised me four grandmasters and delivered seven opening systems.

The habit dates to 2026. December, Riyadh, the King Salman World Rapid and Blitz, me at sixteen in Class XI. I set the alarm for 1 a.m., watched 34 games across three nights, missed two morning practicals, and filled 41 notebook pages with arrows I could not yet read properly. Then I wrote 1,200 words for the school magazine — not about the scoreline but about the silence before a rapid game. The editor cut it to 400. That cut became a permanent rule: never more than three numbers in a paragraph. Every draft since opens with the room, not the result.

So this time, the room again.

The name Clutch Chess conjures one specific picture: the Saint Louis Chess Club, which during the pandemic months built an exhibition format in which the weight of the final games is multiplied several times over, so that a series cannot dissolve into drawn arithmetic. As I understand it, the format was a solution to a television problem. Draws are natural in chess; broadcasts need drama. Make the last board worth three points and suddenly every quiet move hums.

The four-name combination was a story in itself. Caruana and Nakamura — the two most recognisable faces of American chess, the men who turned Saint Louis into a studio over the past decade. Sindarov and Praggnanandhaa — both born in 2026, both from the generation now sitting on board one. Old guard against new, at the same table. That is what I had come for as a reader.

That is not what the page held.

The page held a course. Six videos teaching Black what to do against the systems White plays in order to avoid 2.c4 — the London System, the Colle, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov Opening. This is not a conspiracy; it is a business. But I had gone looking for the match and found the rituals around it — the ritual of the headline, the ritual of the sale, and in between a reader still unsure what he was reading.

Now to the actual content of that course, because I think the least understood thing in chess is why White declines to play 2.c4.

2.c4 is the door behind which sits the entire theoretical warehouse of the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen's Gambit Accepted and the Orthodox Queen's Gambit Declined — and memorising that warehouse is a full-time job at club level. When White plays 2.c4, he is inviting Black to declare which book he has read. When White does not, he closes the book. That is not laziness. It is the instinct of a man who will not pick up a box he does not have to carry.

The London System is the cleanest expression of the idea. d4, Nf3, Bf4, e3, c3, Bd3, Nbd2 — an order that is almost move-order-proof. Whatever Black does, White builds the same structure and reaches move twenty without touching a theoretical trap. The Colle plays the same thought more honestly: e3 first, then Bd3, then a slow build. The Torre Attack adds Bg5 to the skeleton and hands White a pin that Black often notices too late. The Trompowsky is the odd one out — 2.Bg5, bishop out on move two. It looks aggressive and sometimes is, but its real work is dodging the Slav.

What makes this hard for Black is that none of these systems force anything. White is not threatening; he is sitting down. And where White does not force, Black must invent the plan himself — which piece goes where, when c5, when e5, when b6. That is precisely where books run out and understanding has to start. So the course's premise is not worthless. The question is how it is being sold.

And that is where my objection begins.

To label the London, the Colle, the Trompowsky, the Torre, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer and the Richter-Veresov as one block of 'extremely dangerous' systems is not a technical assessment. It is a marketing sentence. These are seven different problems with seven different price tags. Bundling the Catalan is the biggest inaccuracy of the lot — the Catalan is a mainline system played regularly above 2700, and calling it a way of dodging 2.c4 does it an injustice. At the other end, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov are club weapons; their appearance at elite tables is rare enough to count. Putting them on the same page sends a very clear signal: the buyer is the club player who loses to the London on a Tuesday evening, not the grandmaster preparing the Catalan. Which means the four names in the headline are decoration. The content was written for somebody else.

Not many readers will know that. Most assume that the player named in the headline is the player the material belongs to. In chess that confusion is expensive, because here the name is the syllabus.

There is a second point, and it matters technically: there is not a single engine number on the page. No evaluation, no ACPL, no database win rate. The claim is that Black has 'a relevant plan for each individual opening' — that sentence is a promise, not evidence. No reviewer could tell you whether the plan works without watching the videos. And a piece whose job is to sell a course cannot review it; it can only recommend it.

Here I want to talk about an economy we usually skip past in chess.

A large share of a titled player's income now arrives through a camera rather than across a board — video courses, coaching series, opening packages. That is not automatically bad. I have learned more from some trainers' videos than from many books. Valeri Lilov is a Bulgarian trainer; that is a real credential, not a small one. The problem is not the coaching economy. The problem is its packaging — when an instructional product puts on the mask of tournament coverage.

The easy conclusion is that this is clickbait, close the tab and move on. I find that conclusion too cheap, and this is where my argument turns.

I do not think this is one publisher's carelessness. I think it is the ambient temperature of chess's media economy. Where revenue is tied to course sales, headlines gradually bend towards what sells and what does not sell drifts to the back. Tournament coverage is expensive: tribunes, travel, hours of waiting, then the rush to file. A course page is cheap and lasts for months.

I can say this because I have worked both sides of it. In the era of chess I grew up inside, the problem of reach had already been solved. The largest chess media operation in the world is Indian — an odd fact for a sport whose real strength still sits in three cities. But solving reach is not the same as building a record. We have tens of millions of views and almost no long-form written archive.

In August 2026, locked down in Ahmedabad, I live-blogged the FIDE Online Olympiad final for eleven straight hours. India against Russia, six boards, and in the middle of it the screens froze. Four thousand words, sixty-three timestamps, and at 3 a.m. a spinning circle. I refused to write 'India wins', because India had not won — the title was declared shared. That file is still in my folder. It is a record. A promo page is not a record; it is an advertisement that somebody printed in the shape of news.

That is my real worry.

12 December 2026, Singapore, Gukesh against Ding Liren, game fourteen. Twelve draws, two decisive games, and on move fifty-five Ding's rook went to the wrong square. Gukesh, eighteen, won 7.5–6.5 and became the youngest undisputed world champion in history. I filed two thousand words from the media tribune in forty minutes with my hands shaking, then rewrote the piece twice before midnight. I remember the room that night — chairs pushed back, nobody speaking, nobody quite believing it.

Somebody had to write that room down. If chess media's revenue drifts away from rooms like that and towards course pages, the question stops being what we are reading and becomes what we never got to read.

The Viswanathan Anand line matters for exactly this reason. India's first grandmaster title in 2026, then five world titles across 2026, 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026. The cohort that rose behind him has a record because there were people writing at the time. The next generation has video, streams and clips — and where are the books about them?

Even on that Riyadh night, the loudest thing was the chat going quiet. The stream was buffering, the room was silent, and I was sixteen, trying to work out whether the game had ended. Then I thought the problem was the connection. Now I think the problem was the record nobody wrote that night.

I want to be honest here: as of this piece I could not find official confirmation of a Clutch Chess edition featuring these four players — Caruana, Nakamura, Sindarov, Praggnanandhaa. It should be checked against the Saint Louis Chess Club calendar or a FIDE bulletin, and until it is, the headline should be treated as a headline, not as news. I will hold to that even for my last line: do not bury the doubt before the result.

The tab is still open.

Tomorrow morning, in some club somewhere, a player will sit down and somebody will play the London System against him. Whether he has six videos, I do not know. But in that moment he will want a plan, and the need is real — even if the wrapper selling it is not. In chess, information and advertising sit in the same market, and that is both the sport's oldest strength and its newest weakness.

The question is not whether the course is good or bad. The question is: when headline and body begin living in different worlds, who keeps the record of that night — when the screen has frozen, the chair is empty, and the official is sitting in silence?

Screen off. No score.