King's Indian Defense: 9...a5 Against the Bayonet Attack and a Crack in the Source

January in Saint Petersburg, a thin layer of snow on Nevsky Prospekt, and I open a small parcel that an acquaintance from the chess publishing world has sent me. Inside is an instructional opening DVD, its cover printing a King's Indian Defense position with a short line beside it: 9...a5. The accompanying leaflet says this is a practical answer for Black players tired of the main line 9...Nh5 against the Bayonet Attack — theory that engines have dissected down to the bone. In the corner of the envelope, the sender has taped a headline clipped from somewhere: "Samarkand, Round 7: Uzbekistan continue their dominant run, extend the lead." Two stories sit next to each other inside the same envelope. One speaks of an ongoing tournament in Central Asia, of a rising chess nation. The other speaks of Black's ninth move in an opening that has lived for more than a century. After forty-nine years in this trade, I have learned one simple thing: when two stories do not match, the writer must hold on to the one with evidence, not the one that sounds more exciting. The position on the cover is one I know by heart. The King's Indian Defense begins with 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7; Black deliberately concedes the centre and then strikes back with ...d6, ...e5 and ...Nc6. When White pushes e4, the game enters the Mar del Plata Variation — the centre locks, and the two wings become two independent fronts. White storms the kingside, Black storms the queenside, and whoever arrives first wins. In the 1990s that was Garry Kasparov's private stage; he turned the King's Indian from a modest system into a world-champion's weapon. Anyone who watched Linares or Wijk aan Zee in those years remembers the feeling of waiting: White plays 9.b4, and the whole hall holds its breath. That move, 9.b4, is called the Bayonet Attack. White does not wait for Black to organise a defensive line; he thrusts straight into the queenside before Black's pieces can arrive. The idea is clear: open the b-file, drive the black knight off c5, and turn queenside space into a springboard for a central strike. For decades, Black's standard answer has been 9...Nh5, bringing the knight to the rim and preparing ...f5. That is the orthodox road, analysed dozens of moves deep, where every move can be looked up and every deviation punished. The DVD in my hands proposes the opposite. Instead of 9...Nh5, Black plays 9...a5. At once the move attacks White's b4 pawn and forces a choice. If White pushes b5, the queenside is locked, and Black gains time to finish development before striking with ...c5 or ...f5 as the position dictates. If White trades with bxa5, the a-file opens, but that file tilts toward Black — the black a-pawn can advance to a4 and press against White's pawn structure. And if White ignores it, Black plays ...axb4, trading a queenside pawn for a central one, an exchange that usually favours Black structurally in this variation. The appeal of 9...a5 lies elsewhere: it does not demand memory. After White replies to the main line 9...Nh5 with moves such as 10.Re1 or 10.Ng5, the game runs into near-forced sequences where a small slip on move twenty-four can end the game before the player understands what happened. With 9...a5, Black enters a more strategic position, with fewer concrete lines, letting the player rely on structural understanding instead of mechanical recall. The day theory stops advancing, people learn to move more slowly but more deeply. That is the promise the leaflet calls "sound positions with very few concrete lines." Let us be blunt: the promise is plausible, but nothing backs it up. The leaflet offers no sample game. There is no win rate, no draw rate, no ACPL figure, no engine match rate, no sample of grandmaster games. In my trade, a claim without data can still be true — but it remains a hypothesis until somebody verifies it. Based on my experience following matches at Russian team events and international opens, sidelines of this kind usually live or die on a single question: whether the Black player understands the resulting position well enough to play it. Technically, 9...a5 has appeared sporadically in practice for a long time, favoured by club-level players for its practicality. At the elite level it appears far less often, because White's analytical teams have the databases to prepare against it. In other words, the value of 9...a5 is inversely proportional to the opponent's level of preparation. It is a surprise weapon, not a fortress wall. What deserves scrutiny is how the DVD positions its product. The leaflet states that in these positions "objectively the chances are equal," and that "computers often do not know how to handle them." The second claim sounds appealing to a buyer, but it needs to be read correctly. A modern chess engine does not "fail to handle" a position — it evaluates it, and usually returns something near 0.00. The real issue is that positions with many equally valid strategic plans make it hard for humans to find a plan, while an engine needs no plan, only an evaluation. Saying "computers cannot handle it" is a salesman's phrasing, not an analyst's conclusion. As for the phrase "the chances are equal," it should be read as a practical equilibrium for a prepared Black player, not as a refutation of the Bayonet Attack. That is the difference between objective equality and practical equality. A position can be balanced on the board, but if the Black player does not understand the queenside pawn structure, does not know when to play ...c5 and when to play ...f5, that balance collapses within twenty moves. I have seen it happen many times from the stands of Russian team events, where players of national-master strength play the opening correctly but the plan wrongly. The biggest risk in this product is not the opening. It is expectation. Someone who buys a DVD about a sideline is usually looking for safety — a move that can be used forever. But 9...a5 does not offer safety; it offers a choice. If the line becomes popular at club level, its surprise value fades, and White players who specialise against the King's Indian will soon find a way to neutralise it — or, more simply, switch to another anti-King's Indian system such as the Sämisch or the Fianchetto, shifting the preparation burden back onto Black. At this point the story inside the envelope returns. The headline about Samarkand and Uzbekistan dominating Round 7 contains not a single data point from the DVD's contents. No player names, no round results, no standings. If that headline is genuine, it belongs to an entirely different report — perhaps one about the rise of Uzbek chess, where young names such as Nodirbek Abdusattorov or Javokhir Sindarov have forced the world to look again. The actual content of the DVD is an opening-education product for club players. Those two things cannot sit in one article without causing confusion. This is the most serious issue of all, and it has nothing to do with chess. When a source merges two different texts into one, readers have no way of detecting it unless they check every detail themselves. In an era when every result travels in seconds, this kind of error is no longer small. It is like a fixture list printed with the wrong team names — the match still takes place, but nobody can trust the result. For King's Indian players, the practical conclusion remains fairly clear. 9...a5 is worth studying, especially for those who feel suffocated in the forced lines after 9...Nh5. It saves memorisation time, moves the game into strategic territory, and can surprise an opponent at an open tournament with no analytical team behind him. But it needs to be cross-checked against a database and an engine before entering an opening repertoire, and it needs testing in training games, not only in the analysis room. And for readers following the big tournaments, one thought. If you hear of an opening product advertised as the "final answer" to a defensive system, remember that in chess there is no final answer. There are only practical choices, and every choice must be paid for with understanding. The opening market is where people sell certainty to buy hope — and the wise buyer inspects the goods before paying. When the board holds no more pieces, memory begins to score. The finest games I have ever watched were not won by memory but by understanding. A DVD can show you the ninth move. Only you can play the fortieth.