Undervalued Chess and Six Videos: The Quiet Ledger of the Chess Education Market

I opened the page at half past eleven at night. My intention was to verify a quote, not to write an article. "Chess is massively undervalued." The sentence sat at the very top of the page, as if someone had slapped a table and said it — and directly beneath it was an advertisement for six videos. I was scrolling, and the press room of Chennai 2026 floated up in my head. The 44th Chess Olympiad, the first ever staged in India, and my first working accreditation. I sat beside Bangladesh's open team — four boards and a reserve. For eleven rounds I watched sixteen-year-old D Gukesh win eight games in a row on board one. No one there used the word "undervalued." No one sold a six-video package. Only one country, Bangladesh, was settling an account forty years after giving the subcontinent its first grandmaster — asking why that advantage never became a pipeline.

And on this product page, chess itself had become an undervalued stock. I didn't watch the videos. I seized on the question instead: who wrote that sentence, and why was it glued to six videos?

Context

That chess returned after 2026 is not news. In the pandemic lockdowns the stadiums emptied, the universities shut, and the one sport that never needed a crowd quietly stayed alive. I was commentating Leonine Chess Club's online blitz league out of Dhaka: fourteen consecutive nights, nine rounds each, peaking at six thousand viewers on a Facebook stream. There was no roar behind me, no pitch, no weather. By night nine I was describing a knight's long route to f6 the way I would write about a monsoon arriving over the Buriganga. Fourteen nights. Nine rounds. One voice.

That voice taught me that atmosphere is a writing problem, not a sound problem. And in exactly that period a wholly separate layer of chess was swelling — online instruction. Courses, video series, subscriptions. Magnus Carlsen's name, "The Queen's Gambit," the convenience of platforms — together they created a new buyer: the amateur player who fears losing but wants to improve. This market is now chess's quietest, most profitable corner.

To understand the language of this market, one small truth must be kept in mind. Chess was never merely a game; it was knowledge. That knowledge once lived in books, in newspaper columns, in the mouth of someone at a club table. Now it lives in video, behind a paywall. The change is not technological; the change is about ownership. Knowledge has moved out of a person's mouth and become the property of a platform.

And here sit those six videos — as Black's weapon against White's "system" openings. The product itself is a subtle confession: what is sold as a dark-side arsenal is really a prophylactic package, a kind of insurance.

Core Analysis

First, let us understand the game. The openings the videos cover — the Colle System, Trompowsky Attack, Torre Attack, London System, Catalan, Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, Richter-Veresov — are all so-called "system" openings for White. What does system mean? It means a setup that sidesteps main-line theory. White does not play 2.c4, so he never enters the vast theory-ocean of the Slav, Semi-Slav, Queen's Gambit Accepted, or Orthodox QGD. Instead he builds a slow, low-theory structure — Nf3, e3, Bd3, Bf4, c3. That is the Colle, the London, the Torre. In the Colle, White wants a safe pyramid where e4 and Bd3 form a soft but stable centre. In the London, Bf4 comes out early, reducing Black's chances to pose questions within a safe structure. The Torre Attack is almost the Trompowsky's cousin — 1.d4, Nf3, and an early Bg5.

And right here the first crack in the analysis appears. Calling these openings one "after 1.d4 d5" family is technically wrong. The Colle, London, and Torre usually arise after 1.d4 d5. But the Trompowsky, Richter-Veresov, and Catalan arise after 1.d4 Nf6. Joining one to the other is parking cars from two different roads in the same garage. This is not a minor simplification; it reveals that technical precision was sacrificed for marketing convenience. The Blackmar-Diemer Gambit is a wholly different animal — 1.d4 d5 2.e4, a sharp gambit where White sacrifices a pawn for rapid development. The Catalan is the reverse — a main-line system in which White builds a lasting bind with b3 and Bb2. Selling these together as "dangerous systems" means slapping a marketing label where a classification should be.

The second question: are these openings really "extremely dangerous"? The advertising language says so, invoking the "painful experience of many chess players." I respect the sentence but want to measure it. At elite level — 2700+ — well-prepared Black players are comfortable against these setups. The London System is perhaps the one member with genuine elite relevance; in recent years it has been used at the very top level as a low-risk weapon. The rest — Colle, Torre, Blackmar-Diemer — are essentially club-level or surprise weapons.

So where is the real danger? At club level, roughly between 1500 and 2200. There opponents are less prepared, know less theory, and a specific anti-system line becomes a wall in front of them. The real buyer of this product is not the elite but the club player — and that truth is buried under the advertising language. "Extremely dangerous" — with those three words a specific market segment is being mildly frightened so that it buys a course.

The third layer: the trainer's identity. International Master Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer. His role here is not that of a competing player but of a content creator and coach. His authority rests on instructional reputation — the IM title, a training pedigree — not on current tournament results. No rating, no ranking, no recent performance data is offered in the article. In other words, the quality of the material is being established by appeal to experience, not by statistics. This is not unusual in chess, but it cannot be passed off as proof.

And here a larger industry truth is hidden. Chess has now reached a place where an "anti-system" repertoire has become a product of its own — that itself is a market signal. The rise of the London System (a genuine recent trend) is plausibly the commercial catalyst for anti-London products of this kind. The product did not fall from the sky; the amateur playing population has shifted toward low-theory setups, and the education market is converting that demand into money. Note how finely this market is segmented. Niche-repertoire productization — narrow, high-intent solutions (anti-London, anti-Trompowsky) wrapped for a specific buyer segment. This is a low-risk, high-margin model of the education market. Here the competition is not in theoretical novelty but in marketing precision.

Contrarian Angle

Now to the crack that actually drew me to this page — the mismatch between title and body. In the title, a quote, "chess is massively undervalued," attributed to "Turlov." But the body is entirely a promotion of Lilov's six instructional videos. There is no connective tissue between Turlov's quote and Lilov's product. This is not merely editorial negligence — it is a signal. It suggests the title and the body were probably sourced separately, not woven by one editorial hand.

That mismatch is my real lesson. An "undervalued" quote — if it truly belongs to a chess patron or executive — likely came from a sponsorship or advocacy interview, not from the context of Lilov's product. If so, the sentence has been dragged here to borrow prestige: obtain a noble-sounding quote and place a course beneath it. This is not rare in the chess world, because a patron's sentence is worth no less than money.

I know this sounds harsh. But my work demands that harshness. The chess education market is an anxiety market. "Your opponent's favourite White systems are secretly dangerous" — that sentence creates a mild unease, and then the solution is sold. There is nothing wrong with that; the wrong is passing marketing language off as technical fact.

And here I must draw my geographic border, or I will mislead. I write from Delhi, but my memory is Dhaka's. Fusing India and Bangladesh is easy, but it would be wrong. India has eighty-plus grandmasters, corporate leagues, an established pipeline. Bangladesh has five grandmasters, not one new since 2026, and a lost pipeline. I found South Asia's first grandmaster — Niaz Murshed, 2026 — in a folder no one had opened in years. And here, on a product page, chess is "undervalued."

The two "undervaluations" are not the same. One is the language of the stock market; the other is the forty-year account of a country. Lilov's videos may help a club player in India. But Bangladesh's problem is not an opening repertoire — it is a sponsorship drought. It is not a talent drought; it is a patron drought. In 2026 Standard Chartered's school-chess pipeline closed, for decades there has been no home grandmaster-norm tournament, and the federation's annual government support is around eleven lakh taka. In that reality, an "anti-London" course is a luxury, not a solution.

Toward a Takeaway

So is this page meaningless? No. It is a datapoint, and datapoints are my raw material. It shows that chess's education economy has reached a layer where even a narrow prophylactic repertoire can stand as its own product. It shows the amateur London-Colle-Torre population is large enough to sustain dedicated anti-system products. And it shows that the phrase "chess is undervalued" is the commercial optimism of the post-boom period — an open cheque whose amount no one has written.

The question I will end on is not about competition but about accounting. If chess really is undervalued, which corner is valued least — the elite level, where all the money and all the cameras already are? Or those places where a folder stays shut year after year, and inside it the name of a country's first grandmaster sits gathering dust? The archive just blinked. The question is whether anyone will look at it.