The 9...a5 Move and the Great Question of the King's Indian Defense: When Machines Are No Longer Naive

Late August night, after a live broadcast of a national tournament game, I stayed alone in the small studio of Da Nang Radio and Television. Son Tra rain poured outside the window, the rain tapping the metal roof like chess pieces striking a wooden table. I reopened an old game on the computer screen, and on move nine, White pushed the pawn to b4 — the move known as the Bayonet Attack. Across the board, Black thought for a long time. I knew exactly what he was weighing, because I had seen that moment thousands of times: play Nh5, the mainstream path but full of traps analyzed by computers down to the last percentage, or play something else, a less-traveled move, to keep the position in his own hands.

The memory of that night pulled me back to an opening DVD a friend in Saigon had sent me not long before. On the cover was a woman's image, with the title ChessMom Returns: Supporting Mothers On and Off the Board. But when I opened the disc, the entire content spoke of something entirely different: a replacement move for Black on move nine, notated 9...a5, advertised as an antidote to the Bayonet Attack. Title and content were as mismatched as two people sitting at the same table speaking two languages. That mismatch, honestly, haunted me more than the move itself.

I thought I had been exiled from the board, but the board led me deeper into myself. Forty years on the edge of tournaments taught me one thing: sometimes the error is not in the move, but in how people tell the story of that move.

Context: A position built by two hands

The King's Indian Defense is one of the great closed systems of modern chess. With the familiar opening moves — 1.d4 Nf6, 2.c4 g6, 3.Nc3 Bg7, 4.e4 d6, 5.Nf3 0-0, 6.Be2 e5, 7.0-0 Nc6 — Black deliberately concedes central space in exchange for a solid pawn structure and pieces waiting for the right moment to counterattack. This is the system of patient players, who believe strength lies not in occupying but in waiting for the right moment.

The sharpest branch of this system is the Mar del Plata Variation, where the center is locked and both sides race to attack on opposite wings: White pushes pawns on the queenside, Black pushes pawns on the kingside, and the race is often decided by who arrives one move first. The name Mar del Plata comes from a major tournament held in Argentina in 2026, where games in this structure were first systematized into a school. Since then, it has become one of the most thoroughly studied defensive lines in world chess.

In this branch, from the early 1990s, White found a new attacking thrust called the Bayonet Attack: the move 9.b4. Instead of following old paths, White pushes the pawn to open lines for the pieces, threatening to smash Black's structure from the queenside before Black can unleash on the opposite wing. The move is not beautiful aesthetically, but it is ruthlessly effective.

The Bayonet Attack quickly became one of the most uncomfortable tests for King's Indian players. It forces Black to answer a fundamental strategic question: keep the position closed and accept a long war, or open it up to bring the game into calculable lines. And in chess, every choice between closed and open is a choice between two different people within oneself.

Core: Two roads, one choice

Black's orthodox answer for decades has been 9...Nh5. This move has its own logic: the knight advances, clears the way for the f7 pawn to push, and more importantly, pulls the game out of the closed region into concrete lines where computers can calculate to the very end. In exchange, Black must accept a harsh reality: the entire 9...Nh5 branch has been analyzed to exhaustion. Hundreds of top-level games, thousands of hours of engine analysis, and a vast treasury of theory have turned this road into a desert where every footprint is already printed. Anyone who enters without knowing the book will be punished immediately.

That is why the 9...a5 move the DVD proposes deserves a pause for thought. It is not a new invention. It is a long-known move relegated to second tier, an option most professionals skip because they consider it too slow. The idea behind it is clear: instead of rushing into a calculation war, Black pushes the pawn on the queenside to prepare for a long strategic battle, where understanding of structure matters more than memorizing lines. The move does not try to prove Black has an advantage. It only tries to move the game onto a different kind of playing field.

The core point lies here: 9...a5 is not a refutation, but a conscious trade-off. Black gives up a calculable path in exchange for a position where both sides must find their own way. In return, if White knows what he is doing, the position can become dangerous for Black himself, because Black's queenside can be punctured quickly if he is imprecise.

This is where I want to linger a little longer. In chess, people usually judge a move by whether it is objectively strong or weak. But my experience of watching games taught me that something matters more than objective evaluation: the fit between the move and the person. A move slightly weaker objectively but suited to a player's style can bring better results than a theoretically strong move foreign to the one holding the pieces. That is why opening DVDs like this still have a place, even though the world has changed so much.

However, when evaluating this DVD as a professional document, I must be blunt: it lacks verifiable data. There is no concrete figure for match rate with the computer's top move, no average centipawn loss, and no win-draw-loss statistics from a database. Claims such as the position is objectively equal or if Black knows what he is doing things may quickly become dangerous for White are evaluative statements without sources. They sound plausible, but they cannot be independently verified. And in my profession, an unverifiable claim is just a belief dressed up.

It should be added that the strategic idea of 9...a5 does have its own value. It suits a specific type of player: those who prefer to think for themselves rather than memorize, those who believe understanding structure will beat rote learning. For them, this can be a useful tool for building an opening repertoire with a personal stamp. But for those seeking a complete solution, a single move is never enough. One move cannot neutralize an entire main line against every possible deployment by the opponent.

Contrarian: When machines are no longer naive

And here is where I want to state plainly what many in our field think but hesitate to say.

The DVD advertises that computers often do not know how to handle the complex strategic positions that arise. This is an old marketing line, and in 2026–2026, it is no longer true. Modern engines such as Stockfish with its NNUE neural-network architecture or Leela Chess Zero evaluate the closed structures of the King's Indian Defense with reliability that is hard to believe. They are no longer naive robots that only count material. They understand strategy in ways that humans themselves must learn from.

Saying this does not mean I deny the value of strategic moves. On the contrary, I believe that in an era when computers understand strategy so well, the value of a move that shifts the position becomes even more important. But it matters for a different reason: it makes the opponent — the human — think, not makes the computer confused. Computers are not confused. Humans are.

There is a beautiful paradox here: the DVD promises buyers they will beat machines through human understanding, but in reality, it is the buyers who need that understanding to cope with machines — machines that are increasingly becoming the harshest coach any player has ever had.

And there is another, subtler issue: 9...a5 is not a proprietary invention. It is a move that has existed in theory for a long time. Calling it an antidote to the Bayonet is an overstatement. In reality, 9...a5 may well be just one piece of a broader repertoire, not a complete solution. Buyers should treat it as a starting framework, not a guarantee.

As for the mismatch between title and content — the story of ChessMom and mothers — I can only say it is a sign of a data-integrity problem. The title speaks of a community, a social mission; the content speaks of a ninth move. Between the two there is not a single thread of connection. It may be an editor's error, a data-scraping error, or a strange product-packaging strategy. But whatever it is, it reminds us that in an age of information overload, checking provenance matters no less than understanding content.

I remember once, while still at the newsroom, a young editor told me a catchy headline matters more than honest content. I disagreed then, and I disagree even more now. A misleading headline may bring a few reads, but it plants a quiet suspicion in the reader's heart. And in chess, as in journalism, that suspicion is the most expensive thing to win back.

Broader context: The shift of the opening industry

This DVD also tells a larger story about itself — the story of a format's survival.

For decades, opening DVDs were the main vehicle for spreading chess theory. A professional player could sell his knowledge through DVDs produced in database style, and buyers worldwide could learn from them. But today, that arena has changed at the root. Online courses, subscription databases, and free engine tools have eroded the value of DVDs. Why buy a static disc when you can access a living database, updated daily, and ask a computer directly about any move?

This is where I want to spend a moment in reflection. The shift from DVDs to digital services is not just a technology story. It is a story about how humans absorb knowledge. A DVD tells a story with a beginning and an end, guiding the learner through chapters and ideas, in an author's voice. A database does not tell a story. It just gives answers. And in that difference, something regrettable is being lost: the soul of the one who transmits.

I am not a blindly nostalgic person. I understand digital tools are stronger, more precise, and more convenient. But I also know some things can only be passed through story — the patience of a player facing a difficult position, the courage to choose a move the crowd dislikes, and the belief that deep understanding of a structure will beat the mechanical memorization of thousands of lines. Those things are not in a data table. They are in a voice, a way of telling, a way of passing the flame.

Perhaps that is also why, despite knowing well the flaws of that DVD, I still hold some goodwill toward it. It tries to tell a story, even if that story has a mismatched title and an exaggerated ending. In a world where everything is digitized into dry data lines, the effort to tell a story is still an act worth respecting.

Takeaway: A move and a question left behind

When I turned off the screen that night, the rain outside had stopped. I sat alone with an imaginary board in my mind, and I realized the story of 9...a5 is not really a story about a move. It is a story about a choice every player must make at some point in his career: follow the path already laid out, or open a road of his own.

That DVD, with all its flaws — mismatched title, overstated claims, missing data — still touched some truth. It reminds us that amid countless lines analyzed by computers to the end, there is still room for positions where humans must face things themselves, think for themselves, take responsibility for every move. Not because computers do not understand, but because we ourselves need to understand.

And perhaps, in a world where every move can be looked up in an instant, the greatest value of an opening book is not that it gives us answers, but that it asks the right question. The 9...a5 move is such a question: not how to win, but what kind of chess do you want to play.

I thought I had been exiled from the board, but the board led me deeper into myself. And every time I sit before a closed King's Indian position, I hear the Da Nang rain of years past, the chess pieces striking the wooden table, and the voice of an old friend asking me: Nh5, or a5? The answer, I think, is not in the computer. It is in the person sitting before the board, and in the story that person wants to tell. As for those seeking another path for the King's Indian Defense, perhaps what is worth watching is not whether that move wins, but whether it can teach the player a new way of seeing the closed position — a way no engine on earth can replace.