King's Indian and Move Nine: Why 9...a5 Is Not the Answer to the Bayonet Attack

On board four of an open rapid tournament in Da Nang, the game between a twenty-two-year-old player and a national master stopped at move nine. White pushed the pawn to b4. Black sat still, both hands on his thighs, eyes fixed on the board. Fourteen minutes passed before Black touched a piece.

From outside, spectators saw only a pause. I saw an entire market at work.

For anyone who has studied the King's Indian seriously, move nine is the narrowest door in the whole game. White has just played the Bayonet Attack, the plan young players now use to blunt Black's kingside ambitions. And Black, with only fourteen minutes, has to recall how deep into a line that can run twenty moves without hesitation he actually is.

A few weeks later, a student asked me whether any material could help him avoid that kind of silence. The question was not new. The market already had an answer, packaged as an opening DVD, and I spent several weeks reading its promotional text closely.

What is worth noting is that the promotional text promises considerably more than it proves.

The story revolves around a defensive system nearly seven decades old. The King's Indian opens with moves that appear to hand White the entire centre: Black places a bishop on g7, pushes pawns to g6 and d6, and only then starts thinking about reclaiming space. In the classical system Black goes further, pushing the pawn to e5, placing a knight on c6, locking the centre and turning the game into a two-way race. White attacks on the queenside, Black attacks on the kingside, and whoever arrives first wins.

That structure is called the Mar del Plata, named after the tournament held in the Argentine city of the same name in 2026, where the setup was demonstrated at the highest level and quickly became a weapon for players who liked tactical violence. In opening classification, the branch sits around E97 to E99, territory anyone playing Black must study at some point.

Efim Geller turned it into a personal weapon. Garry Kasparov kept it in his files throughout his career and chose the right moment to unleash it. In Vietnam, Le Quang Liem and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son have both faced this system in international events, where a single slow move on the queenside can cost the whole game.

That is why the King's Indian has never vanished from top-level events, even though the computer era has shifted the balance. When every line can be dissected to move twenty-five, conceding the centre and waiting for your opponent to fall into a trap becomes a more expensive gamble than before. The system has moved from permanent weapon to surprise weapon, and the bridge between past and present sits neatly at move nine.

Move 9.b4 is called the Bayonet Attack. White does not rush into a kingside attack. White first blocks Black's attacking muzzle by grabbing queenside space, pushing the pawn forward like a bayonet into the opponent's formation. This plan was pushed to the top level in the 1990s and returned strongly in the past decade, when young players realised that controlling the queenside is the cheapest way to neutralise the King's Indian's kingside ambitions.

Black has two roads, and they differ in nature, not merely in shape.

The main road is 9...Nh5. The knight goes to the rim, preparing to jump to f4, followed by ...f5, ...g5, ...f4, ripping open the kingside. That is the violent line, where both kings sit in the crosshairs and every deviation is punished immediately. It is also the line computers understand best, because everything there can be calculated to the end.

Black can also choose intermediate plans such as ...Nc6 followed by ...Nd7, keeping the centre tense before deciding where to strike. But broadly, every road leads to the same question: does Black attack on the kingside first, or accept a slower game.

The second road is 9...a5, and that is the content of the DVD being sold as an antidote to the Bayonet Attack.

The product promotes 9...a5 with three arguments. First, this branch leads to sound positions with very few concrete lines, meaning the student does not have to cram hundreds of moves. Second, 9...Nh5 opens the position, forces the lines and makes computer analysis important again, whereas 9...a5 takes the game into a strategic battle computers often do not know how to handle. Third, the chances are said to be equal, targeting players who prefer to think for themselves rather than memorise.

Those three arguments sound reasonable. The problem is that nothing backs them up.

The promotional text includes no engine evaluation. There is not a single database statistic on win rate, draw rate or average centipawn loss. Not one sample game is cited. There is no author name, no title, no record in the King's Indian. In a market where buyers can search millions of games for free in seconds, the absence of all of that is a silent but very clear statement.

So what does 9...a5 actually do on the board?

It attacks the b4 pawn head-on. White faces three choices. Exchanging opens the a-file for Black's rook and hands Black a clear target, along with the possibility of later pushing ...a4 to lock the queenside. Pushing on to b5 locks the queenside and shifts the game into a slow manoeuvring battle, where Black still has kingside play but is no longer forced to rush into it. Or keeping the tension forces both sides to calculate on their own without any forced line to guide them.

The key lies in that third choice. When there are no forced lines, the value of the game shifts from memory to the ability to read a position. That is a beautiful promise, and it is also the most beautiful trap in opening marketing.

Because reading a position is far harder to learn than memorising one. A twenty-move line can be bought in one evening. The ability to judge a doubled pawn structure, an open file, a blockaded knight, and how much a queenside is worth against a kingside attack, has to be bought with years and with lost games.

When the cheering stops, I can finally hear the true breathing of the game. That sentence applies to the closed positions of the King's Indian more than anywhere else. There is no explosion there to confirm you are right. There is only pressure accumulating through small moves, and a planning error may go unpunished for fifteen moves, but it will be punished.

Based on my experience following King's Indian games at both domestic and international level, I keep noticing the same thing. The players who win in closed positions are not the ones who remember the most, but the ones who understand most clearly what they are trying to achieve on the queenside. They know when to exchange, when to hold, and when to switch to the kingside even with nothing promising there yet.

There is one more issue rarely mentioned in theoretical reviews. When computers are invoked as a sales argument, people often inadvertently freeze an outdated understanding of chess software's strength. The claim that computers often cannot handle complex strategic positions belongs to the period before December 2026, when neural networks proved that machines can evaluate long-term positions better than the strongest humans ever did. Since then, the gap has only narrowed in one direction.

That does not make 9...a5 useless. It only makes the argument for choosing this branch because computers do not understand it an outdated argument. In practice, it is an argument against free tools rather than against the opponent sitting across the board.

One other detail made me stop while reading the original document. The headline refers to round two of a team event held in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, with top teams winning after close games. The entire body discusses an opening DVD for the King's Indian. Two different texts have been spliced together.

That detail matters more than it appears. It means anyone citing this document is citing an unverified source where the description and the content do not match. For readers interested in top-level chess, it is a signal to verify the origin before trusting it.

Back to the student's question in Da Nang. Would that DVD help him avoid those fourteen silent minutes?

The honest answer is yes, but not in the way he expected.

If the goal is to escape memorisation, 9...a5 does not help. It only changes the kind of work required. You no longer have to remember twenty moves, but you do have to understand why an open file matters more than a weak pawn, why a knight on f4 is stronger than one on e7, why a closed game can still end with a well-timed pawn thrust on the kingside. That is harder work, not less work.

If the goal is a weapon that surprises opponents, 9...a5 does that, but the window narrows every year. Open databases, online courses and thousands of streamed games each day make a secondary branch familiar within a few seasons. Surprise value is no longer a long-term asset, and that is true for both sides.

And if the goal is learning to make your own decisions in positions without a guidebook, then 9...a5 is a good choice, even a very good one. It forces the Black player to think about structure rather than chase memory.

Strategy is like people: you have to know who you are before you try to become someone else.

Here, that means you have to know which kind of player you are. The memory-based group will find 9...a5 loose and frightening, because it offers no anchor. The position-based group will find it comfortable. Neither group is absolutely right. There is only a mismatch between the buyer and the product, and that mismatch is never printed on the box.

Here is a more counterintuitive angle. People often assume an opening with little theory is an easy opening. In chess, the opposite is true for most amateur players. The fewer forced lines an opening has, the fewer anchors you get. You enter the game without a map, and so does your opponent. Whoever reads the position better wins, and that skill is not contained in any DVD, even the best one.

That is why I always advise young students in Vietnam to read promotional material differently. Do not ask whether this branch wins. Ask what skill you will be better at once you finish. If the answer is that you will remember one more line, the product will not take you far. If the answer is that you understand the queenside pawn structure of the King's Indian more clearly, it is worth every dong.

One more gap in this market deserves mention. Most opening theory material is written by men and aimed at a male learner archetype. Meanwhile, Vietnam's women players keep quietly accumulating results on the international stage, from Pham Le Thao Nguyen to the generations that follow. On the board, Judit Polgar proved long ago that no square belongs to one gender. In the commentary box and in the theory writing room, that balance is still a long way from arriving, and every year without change is a year lost.

Back then I sat outside the board, never knowing I would step into a game through words. Years later, I still believe the most important thing about an opening move is not the move itself, but what it teaches the person studying it.

So is that DVD worth buying?

If you are an amateur player who wants one more direction against the Bayonet Attack, and you are willing to spend time analysing closed positions with no ready answers, it is useful. It is a legitimate secondary branch, not a fraud, and it existed in databases long before it was packaged as a product.

But if you are looking for a complete solution, something that makes opponents collapse because they are led into unfamiliar territory, you will be disappointed. You will be disappointed exactly when the clock has run through two thirds of its time, when your opponent has seen this a5 move at least once and knows it kills nobody.

What will confirm the true value of 9...a5 is not a DVD, but games at the highest level. If this branch appears regularly in classical events and survives against well-prepared opponents, it will write its own record. If it appears a few times and then disappears, it will return to being a footnote.

As for the larger question about the real value of an opening idea, I think the answer lies with the young players training every evening in clubs from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. They do not buy promises. They sit down, place the pieces on the board, and work out for themselves what move nine is really asking. It is they, not any DVD, who will decide whether this secondary branch becomes a genuine weapon or is simply forgotten.