The King's Indian Defense, the Move 9...a5, and a Crack Named Samarkand

The white pawn lands on b4 on move nine. If there were a grandstand in that room, no one would stand up. The Bayonet Attack in the King's Indian Defense is the kind of moment whose scale only becomes clear once everything has closed — like the golden seconds you understand only after the match is over. For White, 9.b4 is a bayonet thrust that seizes space before Black can finish building a line. For Black, from that second on, the game becomes a race between memory and understanding. I remember an evening in Shanghai, when the papers circled a sixty-million-euro transfer, while I sat in front of a screen rewinding the same King's Indian game until two in the morning. An old habit. People call chess dry; I find in it the same heartbeat as in any grandstand. An empty stadium still holds the applause of the departed, and so does a chessboard. Recently a chess-opening instructional DVD was marketed as an antidote to the Bayonet Attack. Its core recommendation is 9...a5 instead of the main 9...Nh5. The promotion claims 9...a5 leads to sound positions with very few concrete lines, and that computers often do not know how to handle them. But there is another detail worth pausing on. Right beside that opening recommendation sits a headline mentioning Samarkand, a seventh round, and Uzbekistan's dominance. Not a single line of the body text mentions Samarkand; there is no round, and no player. That is the first crack — and perhaps the most important one in the whole story. When Black trades the center to buy the future To understand why 9...a5 is worth discussing, we need the context. The King's Indian is a system in which Black concedes the center to White, then strikes late with ...e5 and ...Nc6. In the Mar del Plata branch, both sides race into attacks on opposite wings: White pushes pawns on the queenside, Black masses pieces on the kingside. Garry Kasparov once turned this system into a devastating weapon in his prime, and it is thanks to him that the King's Indian holds an irreplaceable place in modern theory. The Bayonet Attack 9.b4 is White's tightest answer: taking queenside space before Black can counterattack. Black's long-standing main line is 9...Nh5 — a razor-sharp move that forces both sides into obligatory variations the computer knows by heart. That is why a portion of club-level King's Indian players have started to feel the fatigue. They do not lose because they misread the position; they lose because they forget a move at level twenty. That DVD aims straight at this fatigue. Instead of 9...Nh5, it proposes 9...a5 — a move that looks modest, almost polite. Black does not lunge into the attack; Black holds, presses on White's queenside pawn structure, and waits. This is not an invention. It is a sideline that already exists, repackaged as a practical choice. What stands behind the promise of "less theory" The appeal of 9...a5 is that it lowers the memorization burden. Where 9...Nh5 forces a player to memorize a tangle of variations, 9...a5 demands something else: structural understanding. Black must know when to push ...b5, when to reroute pieces to the queenside, when to accept a closed center. That is knowledge you cannot cram in a single evening. But let us be honest: the source provides no figure at all. No engine-match rate, no average centipawn loss, no win or draw rate, no master-level game sample. The claim that computers "often do not know how to handle" these positions is a qualitative judgment, not a statistic. And "objectively, chances are equal" should be read as the word of a well-prepared Black player, not as a refutation of the Bayonet Attack. In other words, 9...a5 may be a reasonable choice, but it has not been proven with data. In my trade, that is the moment to be careful. When a club discloses only the injuries that help its share price, fans are left in the dark; here too, the DVD buyer is left with a promise that has no guarantor. A crack named Samarkand What made me pause longest was not the move but the mismatch between headline and content. On one side, a story about a tournament underway in Samarkand, about Uzbekistan dominating and extending its lead. On the other, a promotion for a chess-opening DVD. The two stories have nothing to do with each other, and placing them side by side is a fault of the source. Across three decades in this trade, one lesson has held: when a source contradicts itself, trust the driest part. Not because it is more interesting, but because it is harder to fake. A beautiful headline can be added at any time; a chess move cannot. It must also be said that even setting the crack aside, 9...a5 remains a surprise weapon, not a hinge that shifts elite theory. At club level it may baffle opponents for a few months. But professional players — with an entire preparation team and a vast database behind them — will soon find an answer, or simply switch to a different anti-King's-Indian system. The advantage of surprise always has an expiry date. What remains after a move The move 9...a5 is neither a romantic mistake nor a forgotten truth. It is simply a choice — and every choice on the board is paid for in understanding. The DVD buyer may find an easier path than the main line; but if they expect equality to arrive easily, they will be disappointed. An equal position still demands that a player decide, calculate, and take responsibility. When a seventeen-year-old prodigy does not yet know he is about to become a legend, he too stands before a choice like that. The most romantic mistake of mine was believing that a chess piece can write poetry — but perhaps it is precisely that belief that keeps me here, after three decades with a pen, realizing I have never written about sport. I write about people standing before a quiet choice, in the very second before the world learns their names. For Black in the King's Indian, that second lies on move ten. And the question worth mulling is not how strong 9...a5 is, but this: how many of us are patient enough to understand an equal position, instead of merely looking for a way out of it?