9...a5 Against the Bayonet Attack: King's Indian Mar del Plata and the Promise of 'No Memorization'

On the board, at move nine, White pushes the pawn to b4 — the Bayonet Attack. Black, following the classical lines of the King's Indian Mar del Plata, replies 9...Nh5, a move that opens the position and turns the game into a board of calculation. But a new training product proposes a different road: 9...a5. I have set up this position no fewer than ten times in club analysis sessions, and what made me stop was not the move, but the way it is being sold. No one promises a new move. They promise something harder to measure: a change in the very character of the game. A land for calculators The King's Indian Defense is the classic hypermodern puzzle: Black grants White the center, builds up from afar, then counterattacks that very center. Mar del Plata is the sharpest branch of this line, where both sides charge at each other — White on the queenside, Black on the kingside — and whoever arrives first wins. For decades, this has been the terrain where the sharpest calculators chose to settle their reputations. The Bayonet Attack, with White's 9.b4, is the modern answer. White pushes the pawn to the queenside, gains space, and threatens to break Black's pawn structure before Black can open the kingside. It is not a new idea, but it became fashionable because of its directness: White does not need to create, only to memorize. 9...Nh5 has long been Black's main counter. It opens the position, forces the lines to be played out, and pushes both sides into a contest where the computer is the silent referee. Forget one move and you lose. That is precisely why the opening market always has room for promises that reduce the memorization burden. The opening-study market runs on its own logic. Unlike tournament books or transfer news, it lives by selling answers to popular lines. Whenever a system rises, a product promising an "antidote" appears. In the engine era, when any move can be looked up in seconds, the value of these products rests entirely on storytelling and systematization, not on raw variations. The new King's Indian product appears exactly in that gap. 9...a5: a counter, or a reassurance? The central proposal is 9...a5 — a branch that is already known, not an invention. Black attacks the b4-pawn, forces White to decide on a structure, and steers the game toward a strategic course with few concrete lines. The gist of the promotion: if Black knows what he is doing, things may quickly become dangerous for White. The crux lies in this claim: both sides have equal chances. That is a statement about the position, not about a new move. The product sells on practicality and psychology, not on theoretical superiority. It aims squarely at a specific buyer: players who "like to think for themselves, not memorizers." To be fair, 9...a5 has a place. It is a legitimate, secondary, but not trivial branch. For slow players who prefer maneuvering to a race of moves, it is a comfortable psychological choice — trading the certainty of the main line for the ease of a position that is rarely dug into. Any secondary branch works this way: its value comes from the opponent being unprepared. At the elite level, the King's Indian Mar del Plata survives mainly as a surprise weapon, not a mainstay. The engine era has shrunk its share of classical games: systems such as the Grünfeld or Nimzo-Indian are favored for their lower theoretical risk. Mar del Plata concedes space and invites sharp play, exactly what well-prepared players want. That is why a product on this branch can only target club players and IMs, not the elite. But that practical value does not equal the theoretical claim. What this product does not provide matters more than what it does: not a single sample game, no win-rate statistics, no engine evaluation, no author name with credentials. An opening product, in the end, is only as credible as its own variations. Here, the buyer is asked to trust the promise before seeing the evidence. The line between a secondary branch and a solution We must distinguish clearly: a "counter" and a "solution" are two different things. A counter gives Black a practical option; a solution promises to remove the problem. This product leans toward the second framing, while its technical substance stands only in the first. And this is where I stop. Football taught me something, and chess repeats it every game: "The transfer market is like an endgame: whoever reads the role first breathes a sigh of relief." Here, the product is reading the role of a move, and it reads a little too confidently. The claim that computers often cannot handle such complex strategic positions is pre-AlphaZero language. In the neural-network engine era, machines handle the long-term positions of the King's Indian far better than that sentence suggests. This is outdated marketing copy, not a technical truth. Worse, it is packaged as a counterweight to free tools. The blind spot of the "no memorization" promise No line truly removes calculation from the King's Indian Mar del Plata. That is the system's nature: if such a position could be played without thinking, it would not have survived for so many years. "Few concrete lines" is only partly true — it reduces memorization volume, but not the difficulty of the position. The biggest risk is theoretical obsolescence: a secondary branch can be neutralized by a well-prepared opponent. That is the common fate of every antidote in chess. Once a move becomes popular, the other side finds an answer, and the cycle continues. For the buyer, the biggest risk is not money. It is expectation. A player buys the product believing he is about to hold a system that "needs no memorization", only to sit at the board and realize he still has to calculate every move. That disillusionment costs study time rather than money — and time is the one thing a player never gets back. There is one more detail that bothered me. The title attached to this content refers to a team-event round in Samarkand, while the entire body concerns an opening DVD. The two are unrelated. For someone who built a recording system so as never to misidentify data, "A video wrong from the very start is the most expensive lesson: the eye must always be verified." The mismatch between title and content is a sign of source quality, not a small detail. Verify instead of believe For the serious player, the process should resemble how I re-checked the footage after every match: cross-reference with a current database, run an engine before adopting, and demand to see sample variations with concrete evaluations. "In the middle of the COVID season, sitting in an empty stadium, I heard the breathing of the tactical system." It is the same on the chessboard — once the marketing noise is removed, what remains is only a secondary branch, not a revolution. What is worth tracking is not the promise, but the result. If 9...a5 appears in elite games at the 2700 level, it will prove or disprove itself. If it lives only in advertising, it will quietly vanish from the board, like every counter that is never tested in real play. The wise buyer does not look for a move that solves everything. He looks for enough understanding to read the position himself — something no product can sell ready-made.