Bavarian Championship: The Hussain Besou Headline, and the Colle-Trompowsky Story Buried Underneath It

A headline, as I found it: "Bavarian Championship: 15-year-old Hussain Besou joins the leaders." Below it, I did what I have done for twenty-nine years — I went looking for the one sentence that gives the headline a floor. Which round, how many points, which board, whom did he draw with. That sentence was not there. In its place were six videos: the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the London System, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit. And a seventh name floating loose, the Richter-Veresov — seven openings, six videos.

I read it three times. On the first pass I assumed the crosstable had failed to load. On the second I assumed a fragment of another story had been pasted into the wrong slot. On the third I understood that this was not a technical fault but a map of my own trade. A headline runs on one economy and a board runs on another. The headline needs a name that is fifteen years old and climbing. The board needs the boring things: preparation, patience, and a decision about what kind of game you are willing to play. The two economies almost never meet, and that is why one page carried two unrelated worlds.

I tried to verify Hussain Besou and could not. That sentence will sound strange, so let me be explicit: I had no round-by-round crosstable from the Bavarian chess federation, no Deutscher Schachbund rating list, no Elo card, no result. Not one move was recorded in the material in front of me. I will not make a single claim about a fifteen-year-old's strength, because a claim would mean I had watched him play. I have not watched him play.

What I have is a bulletin whose top half points at a regional championship and whose bottom half points at an instructional product. The real reporting of this piece comes out of that seam.

The Bavarian ladder, and the boy climbing it

To place a regional championship you have to see the German structure as a staircase. At the top the Deutscher Schachbund, beneath it sixteen state federations, beneath them districts and clubs. The Bavarian Championship sits in the middle — below the national championship, above district level. It is where a state's best player is decided and where national qualification is manufactured.

One property of that staircase never makes a headline: at this level you learn a player's real age from the board, not from the rating list. When a fifteen-year-old sits at board one of a state championship, the tension in the room is not produced by his rating; it is produced by the way he sits down. I have watched that tension from the second tier of the Delhi International Open, near the lower door where no camera reaches. A forty-year-old accountant on one side, a sixteen-year-old with folded hands on the other, and the moment the boy pushes a pawn, half the accountant's preparation hangs in the air. No commentator there. The twelve hundred cameras are on some other board.

What can honestly be said about a regional championship is this: it is the first rung where a junior and a veteran share a table and where the cause of defeat is usually not a move but the outer edge of a preparation. At elite events both players walk the same theoretical forest. Here they do not. One has brought forty years of life and nineteen years of study; the other has brought two years of ruthless study.

Which is why the second subject on that page — the Colle, the London, the Trompowsky — belongs to that headline more than any tidy editor would wish, just from the opposite direction. I do not find the join artificial. I find it the most honest join available.

What the body of the piece left behind

The actual content is a video series by the Bulgarian IM and trainer Valeri Lilov: six videos, one plan for Black in each opening. The copy calls the Colle, Trompowsky, Torre and London "extremely dangerous." That is an author's opinion. It is one sentence, not a data point. No engine line, no win percentage, no database analysis accompanies it. I read that sentence as a category claim, not as evidence.

The IM title sits one tier below GM, and in the coaching market that credential is entirely viable. Dozens of trainers work the same model today — less as competitors, more as authors. That is a market fact, not a deficiency.

But there is a technical inconsistency worth logging. The series' premise is what Black does when White declines 2.c4. The Colle, the London and the Torre fit that frame. The Trompowsky fits too, because after 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 White has not played c4. The Catalan? The Catalan begins 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3. It is a 2.c4 main line, theory-dense, mainstream. Placing it in the same package as the Colle and the London indicates either that the product's scope is wider than the pitch — a full 1.d4 repertoire — or that the packaging is loose. Either version is useful information for a buyer.

Seven names and six videos raises a second small question: does one video cover two systems, or is one name on the list for decoration. That is a proofreading matter. For a reader it is not proofreading; it is money.

Now the part this page exists for.

The wall at 2.c4, and the open field behind it

There is a structure in chess preparation that nobody teaches and everybody accepts: against 1.d4, Black prepares the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen's Gambit Accepted and the Nimzo-Indian. That preparation is good, deep, and the most crowded region of modern theory. It has a problem, and the problem is not political but geometric: all of it rests on 2.c4.

White has the right not to play 2.c4.

Lilov's marketing sentence says exactly this, and the sentence is correct even where the advertising around it is inflated. Without 2.c4, the entire structure Black built over a thousand hours is half-useless. To see why, look at what 2.c4 actually gives Black: a target. The c4 pawn is something to aim at. The tension between d4 and c4 produces a clear plan — …c5 against the centre, …e6 for solidity, …dxc4 for material, later a minority attack on the queenside. Black always knows what he is trying to do, whether he wins or loses.

In the Colle or the London that target is absent. d4 stands alone, c4 never appears, and Black has nothing to aim at. He must invent a plan on the board, under the clock. What beats Black in a Colle is not the Colle; it is the empty space where his preparation never took a step.

This is where twenty-nine years of watching becomes useful, and where I remember how often I have watched myself lose while trying to fill that empty space. In 2026 I called round seven of the National Premier in Kolkata alongside IM Sagar Shah. Two 2500-rated players drew in fourteen moves. There was no empty space on that board — both knew exactly what to do and both did it. Twelve hundred viewers heard me say the players had "agreed to stop breathing in the same room." The chat laughed. The line was right, and its being right connects to what I was slowly learning: the most activity in chess happens where nobody has a plan. A fourteen-move draw is the end of a plan. A Colle is the beginning of one. I find the second kind of game more fertile.

So let us walk the seven systems and ask, for each, what Black actually has.

The Colle: 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3, then Bd3, Nbd2, c3, and a slow build-up with the e-pawn as a shield. Black has two answers and both demand discipline. Block or meet …e5 in time to stabilise the centre, meaning a strike with …c5 or …e5 against that shield. Or solve the bishop problem with …b6 and …Bb7, since a bishop on d3 stares at h7 for the rest of the game. Against the Colle, Black's real examination is procedural, not tactical — can he choose a plan of his own accord, with no forcing move to help him.

The London: 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Bf4, or 2.Bf4. This is the most popular setup at club level today, and the reason is efficiency, not beauty. White can play broadly the same moves against almost any Black structure: e3, c3, Nbd2, Bd3, h3, then a plan. Black has two good weapons — a timely …c5 strike, and pressure on the f4 bishop with …Nh5 or …Qb6. A late …c5 loosens his own position; an unprepared …Nh5 just moves the bishop and damages the pawn structure. The most common error against this system is emotional: Black gets bored and does something. Against the London, patience is a technique, not a temperament.

The Trompowsky: 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5. The most psychological of these systems, not the strongest. White develops the bishop outside the chain and asks Black a question he has not rehearsed: …Ne4, …d5, …h6 or …e6? Each answer is a different game and they do not resemble each other. I have watched inexperienced Black players choose …Ne4 because it looks active, then spend fifteen moves managing their own centre. The whole theory after …Ne4 rests on one question — is the exchange of bishops good for Black? The answer depends on the position, and that is the trap. The Trompowsky is not a weapon. It is a question.

The Torre: 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Bg5. The bishop eyes f6, and …h6 looks natural, but every …h6 concedes something. The system keeps transposing into the London or a Queen's Indian, and Black's difficulty is deciding which identity he wants. What happens against the Torre is what happens against every sideline: Black does not need moves, he needs an identity.

The Catalan: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3. I have already logged this as a packaging inconsistency, but at the level of the game it is the most serious system on the list. Here Black's preparation is a 2.c4 preparation, so this is not the fear — this is home. Black has …dxc4 and …b5 for queenside expansion, or a closed centre and a slow fight. The Catalan is where the video series collides with its own advertisement: a player frightened of the Colle is not frightened of the Catalan, because he has prepared for it.

The Blackmar-Diemer Gambit: 1.d4 d5 2.e4. Objectively fine for Black — he simply has to take and hold. That is the trap. At club level there are two kinds of Black player: those who take the pawn and end up defending, and those who decline and make their position permanently awkward. This system wins on morale, not on theory.

The Richter-Veresov: 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bg5. Probably the least discussed system here and the most useful today, because it transposes into modern constructions like the Jobava-London. For Black, …Nbd7, …e6, …Be7 and then the perpetual …h6 question. Same story: no forcing move, therefore no plan.

The biggest inequality in chess is not on the board

Now the part I trust most and hear discussed least.

I am suspicious of numbers that measure effort. Football packages distance covered and high-intensity sprints as effort metrics, when pointless running also produces pretty numbers. Chess has an exact equivalent: how many hours of theory you watched. That number is meaningless. Meaning lives where you decided what kind of game to play, and in how ruthlessly you can carry that decision out.

A Black player who prepares 2.c4 locks himself in a safe room. The walls are handsome, the door is strong, and the rest of chess is outside. The Colle player does not knock on that door; he walks along the wall looking for the place where it ends. That is not cleverness. It is a trade, and it is paid for on both sides.

This is where Lilov's marketing is most overstated and his teaching most useful. If "extremely dangerous" means the Colle is objectively better than the Slav, it is false. The Colle's ceiling is low, its depth limited, and against a Black player who can build a plan it slowly gets squeezed. The accurate reading is this: it is extremely dangerous to the Black player who has spent his entire preparation on a game that will not now be played. That sentence is true and that sentence sells — both can hold at once, and usually do.

The shape of that market matters, because it tells you as much about chess as any tournament. When we started ChessBase India in 2026 there was almost no market for chess video journalism in this country. After 2026 an audience appeared — on YouTube, in regional languages, for free. The people who built that audience are not consumers to me; they are the viewers my early career never had. That same audience created the instructional market, and authors like Lilov walk into it. The space is crowded: Chessable, Chess.com, dozens of independent producers. Within it, "a plan for Black against the sidelines" is a recognised, saturated, still-empty corner. Six videos, seven names, a standalone series with no platform backing — the arithmetic is harsh.

What everyone believes and gets wrong

Now the direction this whole page has been walking toward.

Collective memory ties these seven systems to giant-killing stories. Some grandmaster played the London at a big event, tangled a champion, and the game filtered down to club level. That memory strikes me as false, and not only because it rests on one or two games. It strikes me as false because it inverts what these systems actually are.

They are not weapons. They are taxes.

When White plays the Colle he is saying: I give you the initiative, and in exchange I take your preparation. That is a good trade if your preparation is worth more than my initiative. It is a bad trade if you are the stronger player and initiative is everything you have. Which is why these systems are lethal at 1600 and a burden at 2600. And why their aggregate record is dull — a high draw rate, an average win rate, and the real numbers never appear in a video because they do not sell.

Second, the largest blind spot in this whole conversation: a fifteen-year-old does not lead a regional championship because he plays the Colle. He leads it because he plays two hundred rated games a year and the forty-year-old opposite him plays twenty. That is the dullest sentence on this page and the truest. The preparation market converts that dull truth into an exciting product, because "play twenty more games" does not sell. No video says: your real gap is not talent, it is hours at the board.

Third, and this connects to the seam that started the page. We apply the "young star rises" template to chess news so fast that verification becomes an afterthought. The Bavarian headline is a clean specimen — a teenager in the headline, an instructional product in the body, and no editor in between. If the boy really is at the top, that is a good story that can stand on its own. If he is not, it is a story that has lost its own subject. Either way the reader pays the same price: he cannot tell what to trust.

And here my oldest mistake returns. In 2026, from a bedroom studio in Kolkata, I called the FIDE Online Olympiad final. The server failed for forty minutes. The board froze. Eight thousand viewers waited. I did not want to fill that dead air with speculation, so I called the frozen screen a stadium holding its breath, and read a short passage about empty playgrounds during lockdown. That was the part people remembered; not the chess. Forty minutes of dead air taught me that absence has a broadcast signal, and that the respect due to it lies in not filling it. The absence in the material I am writing about today — no result, no rating, no round — is also a signal. I will not hide it, because if the feed broke, I say so.

What to watch next

The round-by-round results of the Bavarian Championship live in the Bavarian chess federation's crosstable. Only when that crosstable opens can this page's headline be turned into news, and I will open it — every round, every board, every draw. When the paper arrives I will know whether that fifteen-year-old played a Colle, and if he did, what the older player opposite him put into the empty space.

For the reader who wants something today, a small suggestion: the next time a teenager glows in a headline, look at the clock, then look at the rating list. One of the two will tell you more truth. And the next time somebody plays a Colle, a London or a Trompowsky, look at the scoresheet for the move on which Black began his first independent plan. If he found that move, the game was decided by something other than a sideline. If he could not, then the forty minutes nobody filmed were the whole game.