The Undervaluation of Chess: Six Videos, One Quote, and the Diagnosis of an Invisible Pipeline

I have counted heartbeats in Paltan, and those numbers confessed more than any tackle ever could. This month, though, I had to place my stethoscope on an online product page — where one quote, one headline, and six instructional videos lie side by side. The headline reads, "Chess is massively undervalued." The words belong to someone named Turlov. The body of the page belongs to Bulgarian trainer IM Valeri Lilov. That gap between the title and the body is my first diagnostic sign — and it is not an accident, it is a pattern.

I have been reading chess news for forty-seven years, but I have never read chess as a mere game. To me, chess is an endurance event — a place where body, mind, and institutional economy carry the load together. In April 2026, when I strapped heart-rate monitors onto six players at the Dhaka Premier Division League, I learned that an average game runs four hours and fifty-two minutes, that a 51-year-old grandmaster peaked at 138 bpm in a six-hour rook endgame, and that one guest player was hospitalized for dehydration after round six. Those numbers taught me that chess is not a pure contest of intellect; it is a physiological event, inside which an economic system works in silence.

That economy has now grown a new organ — the instructional content market. Courses, video series, subscriptions, affiliate placements. Lilov's six videos are a tissue sample from that organ. The subject: an anti-system repertoire for Black. In other words, a remedy against the very White systems that ordinary players use to avoid main-line theory. Look at the list — the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the London System, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, the Richter-Veresov Opening.

These do not belong to one family, and here lies the first technical error. The Colle, London, and Torre usually arise after 1.d4 d5; the Trompowsky, Richter-Veresov, and Catalan arise after 1.d4 Nf6. The first group avoids playing 2.c4, and thereby sidesteps the deep waters of the Slav, Semi-Slav, Queen's Gambit Accepted, and Orthodox QGD. The second group tries to dodge the main highway of the Indian defenses. Packing seven different openings into one "package" is a technical simplification — and simplification is the first step of product marketing.

This is where my interest sharpens. The chess-education market swells precisely when the underlying chess reality contracts. In March 2026 the games stopped. I was alone in a Boston apartment with no live events, so I retreated into tape — over ten months I watched more than three hundred hours of online chess. The Magnus Carlsen Invitational, Leonine Chess Club's pandemic events, the FIDE Online Olympiad in August, where Bangladesh's players competed from their bedrooms. I logged what nobody logs: nine of twelve Bangladeshi players reported eye strain, five reported wrist pain, two reported leg swelling after six-hour sessions. I named it screen-board syndrome. And in that moment it became clear: the load did not fall, it merely changed location — from the hall to the screen.

That relocation is the fuel of the content economy. When a player competes online from home, most of the preparation happens in front of a screen, alone, through courses and videos. The trainer no longer sits at the club table; the trainer now stands on a product page. Lilov is exactly there — as a content creator and trainer, not as a competitive player. Notice where his authority comes from. It does not come from rating data, from recent tournament results, or from any engine match-rate or average centipawn loss. It comes from an appeal to experience — "the painful experience of many chess players." Pain can be quoted, but pain cannot be measured. And what cannot be measured is not analysis; it is advertising.

In the same way, "chess is massively undervalued" is a claim, not evidence. Who says it, in what context, on the basis of what numbers — the page says nothing. Yet the phrase sits in the headline as though it were the thesis of the piece. In reality it is a form of prestige-borrowing: using a big name's quote to lend grandeur to a course. I call this prestige transfusion. Blood is drawn from one bag and given to another patient, and there is no cross-match between them. Turlov in the title, Lilov in the body — that disconnect is a sourcing defect, and sourcing defects are nothing new in chess coverage.

Now to the actual tissue. Lilov's claim that these systems are "extremely dangerous" is overstated at elite level. At the top, a well-prepared Black player is generally comfortable against these setups. The London System is the exception, because in recent years it has genuinely been used at the highest level as a low-risk weapon. But the Colle, the Torre, and the Blackmar-Diemer are essentially club-level or surprise weapons. The real "danger" lies in the 1500-to-2200 rating band, where opponents are less prepared — and that band is the true buyer of this product.

That band is familiar to me, because I have kept its notebook for two decades. I have watched why an amateur plays the London. He wants to avoid theory, so he does not play 2.c4. It is a defensive behavior, not an aggressive one. And that behavior has a physiological cause: preparation has a cost in time. A club player's capacity to bear that cost is limited — his sleep, his eyes, his working hours are all limited. So he chooses a system, because a system gives him the most safety in the least time. A system opening is never merely a style; it is a symptom of resource constraint.

Here comes my counter-intuitive finger. The marketing says the systems are dangerous, so Black needs a remedy. But look closely, and both the remedy and the disease grow from the same economy. The player who chooses a system to avoid theory is the same player who will later buy a remedy against that system. A preparation gap creates a product, and that product in turn keeps the preparation gap alive as a market. It is a closed circuit — and in this circuit, nutrition flows to the education market, not to the player's understanding.

I am not delivering a moral verdict here. I am identifying a risk, a well-known side effect of instructional material: pattern-memorization standing in for understanding. If you buy a system opening as the primary answer, the principles of opening play will never enter your head. In small doses this is not harmful. But over time it stalls a player's growth. In my physiological language: it is a micro-trauma that, if repeated, becomes a stress fracture.

So where does the word "undervalued" actually sit in the context of this content economy? In my reading, chess is indeed undervalued — but not in the way Turlov means. Chess is undervalued not in a commercial sense; chess is undervalued in an institutional sense. And I found the clearest proof of that undervaluation in Bangladesh. Niaz Murshed became a grandmaster in 2026 — a year before Viswanathan Anand. Yet Bangladesh has produced no more than five GMs since, and none after 2026. I call this the First-GM Paradox. It is not a shortage of talent — it is a sponsorship drought, a ceiling on government support, and the collapse of school chess programs in 2026.

I know there is a trap in making this comparison — India envy. I was born in India, but the purpose of this piece is not scale, it is structure. The question is not "why is Bangladesh not like India"; the question is, "why is a content market swelling while a national pipeline dries up." The answer, to me, is clear: the content economy reaches individuals, while a pipeline demands institutional patronage. A trainer can sell a video; he cannot launch a school program. So the market pays the individual, while the pipeline wants a system — and the system is what is missing.

What I learned in 2026 is that remote observation can itself be primary evidence. I left the press tribune for the screen and moved my sourcing into group chats and streaming logs. And that was when I understood that the pandemic changed chess's landscape — but the change was not only technological, it was physiological. The load did not fall; it migrated into the eyes, the sleep, the anxiety, the broadcast pressure. And precisely at that moment, the content economy recognized that pressure as a market.

I had seen the same pattern outside chess before. From November to December 2026, I decoded the Qatar World Cup from Boston, building a congestion index from broadcast frames and medical bulletins — ninety minutes every four days, plus stoppage time, plus travel. Five months earlier I had watched the 44th Chess Olympiad in Chennai, where Bangladesh's team sat five hours a day for eleven days, and Rani Hamid, in her late seventies, kept winning games. I argued the same autonomic load — cortisol, sleep loss, cardiac drift. The bodies of football and chess run on one nervous system; only the language differs. I wrote that comparison in a single sitting, five thousand words.

Now to the least-discussed tissue. 5 July 2026. I was filing Paris Olympics previews from Boston when the wire arrived: GM Ziaur Rahman, fifteen-time national champion, peak rating 2570, dead of a heart attack mid-game in a Dhaka league match, aged 59. I pulled thirty years of notebooks, including a 2026 entry noting Zia's hands shaking after round seven. My reconstruction: no defibrillator at the venue, no medic on site, players in their fifties sitting six hours, and a federation surviving on roughly eleven lakh taka a year in government support.

I do not want Zia's death to become an emotional prop in this piece. I keep it as evidence of a system failure. Because here the difference between the content economy and the underlying chess reality is sharpest. A course is sold by an individual's skill; a venue is made safe by institutional rules — defibrillator, medic, hydration, round limits. I now run this checklist against every event. And when I look at Lilov's six videos, the question becomes: these six videos will solve a player's opening problem, but who will solve his venue problem?

That question is the core of my counter-angle. The industry is now investing in its brightest side — content, courses, streaming, subscriptions — and neglecting its darkest — safety, pipeline, patronage. To see these as separate would be a mistake; they are two organs of one body. When a market swells, it becomes unconscious of its roots. Chess is doing exactly that. If the word "undervalued" truly means anything, it means not a course's price, but the absence of a national pipeline.

In the industry's transmission map, this page is a small but real data point. On the bright side are platforms, courses, streaming, and derivative markets — books, videos, affiliate links. Their impact is positive, but small and long-lasting. Toward the roots — youth training, talent supply, school programs — the signal is nearly zero. Just as a niche-repertoire product targets a specific buyer segment, an industry focuses on its most profitable parts and forgets its most fragile ones. The post-2026 chess boom created a vast crowd of new and improving players; that crowd is the raw material of these products. A low-risk, high-margin model. And this model never collapses, because it does not bet on a championship; it simply sells a course.

My takeaway is clear. I am skeptical of the truth of Turlov's quote, because its origin cannot be verified anywhere. I am doubtful of the instructional value of Lilov's videos, because they are essentially club-level aids, not elite-level solutions. I read the "extremely dangerous" claim as marketing, not analysis. But above all this, I see a structural signal: the chess-education economy can now prove that chess is undervalued — but that very proof is covering up its own pipeline crisis.

My advice is for the patient, not the market. If you are an improving player, a system opening is your aid, not your alternative. If you are a buyer, the word "dangerous" should raise your pulse a little, because the language of danger is often the language of sales. And if you are an organizer, remember: keeping a defibrillator at a venue is less profitable than selling a course, but it saves far more lives.

Tissue is never the first witness — tissue is always the last witness, not the first suspect. Lilov's six videos and Turlov's one quote are the first suspects. Where is the last witness? The last witness is a hall where nobody counts heartbeats. And until somebody does, the undervaluation of chess will remain only a marketing headline — not a diagnosis.