Six Videos, Eleven Openings: The David Antón Headline and the Real Story

I read that headline on a cold afternoon in Saint Petersburg: “David Antón Guijarro takes the sole lead at Legends & Prodigies.” Outside the window, the Neva kept flowing, quiet as a player weighing a move. I clicked, expecting a game score, a position, a moment. What appeared before my eyes was a course.

There was no game in it. No score, no named opponent, no round number, no standings table. Only a player’s name used as bait, and a product behind it.

I am not retelling this to blame anyone. I retell it because after nearly half a century of watching chess, I have noticed something quiet: the game keeps us alive through information, but what keeps its economy alive is the headline.

David Antón Guijarro was born in 2026. He sits between two generations — young enough for organizers to call a “prospect,” old enough to no longer be a “prodigy.” The event called “Legends & Prodigies” is exactly the kind of product organizers use to raise money: two generations sharing one table, one side memory, one side the future. The name is good. But it is also a packaging decision.

The headline about Antón only needs a name with search value. It has that name.

What about the body — where a game should have been?

It is an instructional product. IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian International Master, is the author of a six-video course. Its subject: plans for Black against anti-theory 1.d4 systems. The name on the outside is Antón; the content on the inside is Lilov.

To chess fans, the name Lilov is not unfamiliar. He belongs to a tier I would call “instructional authors” — players whose professional level sits below the Grandmaster threshold but who are skilled enough to turn their knowledge into a product. In modern chess this is no longer unusual. It is a legitimate income channel, running parallel to tournament prizes. For some, it has become the primary one.

Six videos, eleven openings. I did a simple division: half a video per opening.

The list deserves careful reading. There is the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the London System — the group players call “anti-theory,” where White deliberately does not play 2.c4. There are main-line systems such as the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen’s Gambit Accepted, the Orthodox Queen’s Gambit Declined. Then there are the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov Opening — systems entirely different in structure and philosophy.

Half a video per opening. For me, that number says everything.

I have followed courses dedicated to a single system. A decent Black repertoire on the London System usually needs six to fifteen videos — just to grasp the main ideas. Here, eleven openings are crammed into six videos. It is like telling someone to learn eleven languages in six weeks and expecting fluent conversation.

The course, to be fair, touches a real pain point.

Black players who prepare deeply for the Slav, Semi-Slav or QGD are often denied 2.c4. They enter the game with a full theoretical repertoire, only to be led into a different room where none of it applies. This is a genuine gap in preparation, and a product aimed at it is not meaningless.

But the way it is presented deserves a pause.

The same article, in one passage, calls the anti-theory cluster “not very ambitious” — meaning White does not play them for a big win. In another passage it calls them “extremely dangerous” for Black. These two statements can coexist if we understand the cluster as “drawish but safe” for White. But when the wording is stretched from “solid” to “dangerous,” the line between technique and marketing has been erased.

An old coach once told me: “An opening is never more dangerous than the name people give it.” He was talking about chess, but the line holds for headlines too.

So where is the blind spot?

The blind spot is that the reader is invited to focus on Antón, while the truth of the page lies with Lilov. This is a familiar structure in the chess content economy: use the name of a popular player — or an event with an attractive title — as a search anchor, then lead the reader toward a product. Commercially, it works. Informationally, it leaves a hole.

When the stadium no longer has a ball, memory starts scoring. Here too — when the page no longer has news, what remains is the product.

I do not object to an International Master earning a living through courses. Without them, amateur chess would be much poorer. But one lesson from decades of holding a pen stays with me: when an educational product hides behind the headline of a match, the reader deserves to know what they are buying.

I wonder: what makes a headline borrow someone else’s name? The answer lies in the nature of the attention market. A good course, however good, cannot find its own readers. A good game, however good, still needs someone to tell it. When those two needs meet, the headline becomes a bridge — and sometimes that bridge spans a chasm that should not exist.

If you are preparing against anti-theory 1.d4 systems, this course may be a starting point. But do not expect it to replace an in-depth repertoire. Dividing eleven openings across six videos chooses breadth over depth. That is a reasonable choice for a beginner, and a trade-off for someone with an established base.

More to the point: Antón is still somewhere in that tournament. His true score, his true form, his true opponents — none of it has been told. And perhaps it never will be in this article.

The transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope. In the chess content market, people sell names to buy attention.

Six videos, eleven openings, one headline, and one player’s name. Placed side by side, those four numbers show me what chess is doing to itself: using one person’s story to sell another person’s story.

At Luzhniki, the old bird understood that landing is also a way of flying. Here, the headline also “lands” as a product. But I am not angry. I only record it.

Because in the end, headlines fade, products grow old, but the game remains. And when every headline has gone quiet, the only thing still worth reading is the move.

Tonight, in Saint Petersburg, snow falls again. I fold the article and open the board. The first move is always the truth — no headline can change it.