9...a5: An 'Antidote' to the Bayonet Attack, and Its Empty Ledger

It was two in the morning in Dublin, and I laid the board out. The DVD cover said — "ChessMom returns: supporting mothers on and off the board." I opened the file, and what came up on the board had not a single word to do with mothers. It was the King's Indian Defense, Classical System, Mar del Plata Variation. White played the Bayonet Attack, 9.b4. And for Black, the proposal arrived on an unusual move — 9...a5.

Two things here do not match. The title says one thing; the board says another. In chess history this gap between cover and board is nothing new; what is new is that the gap is now stitched onto a commercial product. I sat down in front of the board. The pattern had been waiting.

The Bayonet Attack is more than a move — it is an attitude. In the King's Indian Defense, Black first gives up the centre, then strikes back with ...e5. In the Mar del Plata Variation, 7...Nc6 arrives, and both sides race to attack on opposite wings — White on the kingside, Black on the queenside. White's Bayonet, 9.b4, tries to cut the speed of that Black plan. It points a finger at the join between Black's c5-knight and d6-pawn, and questions Black's natural ...b5 plan on the queenside.

That is precisely why the Bayonet is so popular in modern chess. It is not comfortable for White, and it is awkward for Black. And the traditional answer to that awkwardness is 9...Nh5 — the knight goes to the rim and prepares ...f5 and the central ...e4 thrust. It is sharp, it is forcing, and this is where the burden of computer-driven calculation begins.

My problem is with that word, "forcing." Across twenty years of notebooks I have seen that a line called "forcing" is not really forcing — it is simply the line that, at that moment, is the most heavily analysed. Against the Bayonet, 9...Nh5 is exactly that: thousands of games in the database, the engine's memory measured centimetre by centimetre. For a club-level player, this means one thing — a mountain to memorise.

And here is the DVD's commercial logic. Its proposal: abandon the forced arithmetic of 9...Nh5, and choose 9...a5. The move speaks of grabbing space on the queenside — preparing ...a4, ...b5 if needed, and along the way sidestepping the deepest computer lines.

Laid out on the board, the move does not look bad. 9...a5 is not actually something new; it is a known sideline in the King's Indian, not a novelty. Yet the DVD's central selling claim is presented as if it were a novelty. The first gap is here.

The trade between the two paths needs to be understood. Choose 9...Nh5 and Black gets clear, forcing, calculable play — and loses the comfort of not having the engine's shadow over his head, plus the load of memorisation. Choose 9...a5 and Black gets quiet, plan-driven, low-memorisation play — and loses the clarity that gave him theoretical certainty. One line buys memory; the other buys understanding. The question is which one the DVD is selling.

The DVD's central claim comes in two parts. One, "objectively the chances are equal." Two, if Black knows the plans, the game can quickly become dangerous for White. The second claim may well be true — for anyone who does not know the plan, any quiet position is dangerous. But the first claim demands a number, and that number is nowhere to be found.

The ledger is blank. There is no average centipawn loss, no engine evaluation, no sample-game count, no win-draw-loss ratio. "The chances are equal" is a claim about a fraction, but nobody has shown the fraction. This blank outside the board matters more than the claim inside it.

There is one more claim, and it is out of step with the era: "computers often do not know how to handle these complex strategic positions." In the age of modern engines, that is an ornament, not a technical truth. An engine today understands closed King's Indian positions well. What that sentence sells the buyer is not technology — it is comfort. Comfort is not bad, but when comfort is passed off as proof, the problem begins.

So who is the product for? Certainly not grandmasters. For those who already know both lines, 9...a5 is not news. The buyer is the club-to-International-Master player who has lost time in forced-line preparation. For him, 9...a5 can be a sound decision — if he understands the move rather than memorising it. This is the DVD's real value, and this is its real risk.

I have kept diagram-first notes since 2026. In 2026 I built a four-month ledger on Bangladeshi chess, and it showed me that long-run decline is always written in fractions, and the fractions are always quiet. In 2026 the stadiums emptied and the board moved online; that stretch taught me which noises were ever real. The same applies here — I listen to the loud claim, and I hunt for the quiet number.

But the real problem sits elsewhere. Everyone assumes the product's rival is White's Bayonet Attack. My reading says no. The DVD's real rival is other Black repertoire material — books, databases, YouTube. Because the move being sold here is already available for free.

Here is the counter-intuitive turn. The biggest risk of buying an "antidote" is not that the move is bad. The risk is that once 9...a5 becomes your weapon, you become predictable. The moment the sideline is popularised, White builds the answer — and then your "antidote" becomes a target itself.

The second turn is quieter. The cover says mothers; the inside says Bayonet arithmetic. This mismatch may be mere marketing carelessness, or it may be deliberate — because selling a product in the name of community is easy. This gap between title and content is a signal: here, emotion was sent ahead of evidence. In the chess ledger, emotion is a move, not proof.

First, though, a difference must be stated. Bangladesh's chess crisis and the claim of a repertoire DVD are not the same thing. Behind one stand population, economy, a federation budget; behind the other stands a market. Any comparison must admit this asymmetry first, or the resemblance turns false.

Once that difference is admitted, a resemblance does appear. In Dhaka we once all said "a shortage of talent," while the ledger told a story of fractions — missing norm tournaments, a dead school pipeline, grants you could count on one hand. For years the lament was loud; the ledger was quiet; in the end the ledger won. This DVD is cast in the same mould — a loud claim, a quiet number.

For the player genuinely considering 9...a5, my advice is simple. Set the move up on the board yourself. Then run it through a current engine, and check an up-to-date database — what does 9...a5 actually score against 9...Nh5. Then check whether anyone at the top is playing it, or whether it is merely club-level consolation.

Those three steps — engine, database, top-level usage — are all missing from the product's pitch. That makes the pitch incomplete, and if you do not do the arithmetic yourself on an incomplete pitch, the seller of the DVD will do it for you — to his own advantage.

In the months ahead I will watch three things. One, what the engine makes of 9...a5. Two, how often the move appears against the Bayonet at the top level. Three, whether a counter-antidote comes from White's side. The day those three answers arrive, I will know — is 9...a5 an understanding, or one more memorised line, which one day will change like the cover did.

The board always tells the truth. The only question is — do we look at the board, or read the cover?