The Scotch Opening, Kasparov 2026, and an Instructional Video Past Its Expiry Date

In the autumn of 2026, in New York, a hand pushed the d2 pawn to d4 on the third move. No one in the hall stood up. There was no applause, no murmur. Only the steady ticking of chess clocks and the scratch of pencils in the notebooks of reporters in the upper rows. I was twenty that year, having just left the board to take up writing. I jotted a line too: "Kasparov plays the Scotch. Probably for a change of air." Then I closed the notebook, went for coffee, and forgot. Thirty-five years later, I opened that notebook again. That naive note now reads like a fairy tale told wrong. The move I thought was just a change of air has become one of the most thoroughly studied opening systems in modern chess. And eventually, people began producing books, videos, and courses — not to teach it, but to counter it. The most recent video I watched belongs to that category. A trainer named Adrian Mikhalchishin, introduced as "renowned and successful", sits before a board and talks about how Black can neutralize the Scotch opening. Roughly sixty minutes long. A familiar format for the short-form training product. The promises are familiar too: simple, practical, no need to panic. I watched it through. Then I sat still for a long while. The Scotch begins with 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4. Before 2026, the elite chess world looked at it with condescension. It was filed under "harmless" — the opening strong players chose when they wanted a quick draw, or when they had not prepared anything for that afternoon. It smelled of no danger. It kept nobody awake at night. It was like a bland dish served at a banquet of gourmets. Then Kasparov brought it into the 2026 World Championship — the fifth and final match of the Kasparov–Karpov rivalry, played between New York and Lyon. There, the Scotch appeared like a small blade hidden in a sleeve. Before that, the experts had laughed at it. After that, nobody laughed. That is how an opening is revived: not by an article, not by a seminar, but by a hand pushing a pawn on a wooden board in front of the world's cameras. When a champion still does not know he is opening the way for three decades of theory behind him. I retell this because it is necessary to understand what is actually being sold in that video. The product does not sell a move. It sells the memory of a move. Based on my experience following matches and training products across thirty-seven years in this industry, I have drawn a fairly stable rule: whenever an opening is deemed "harmless", the training market will sell you two contradictory things within the same decade. The first is a course on how to play it. The second is a course on how to counter it. Both rest on the same assumption: that this opening matters. So what does Mikhalchishin's video say about the Scotch? It says Black can neutralize. "Neutralize" is a beautiful word. It does not promise victory, does not promise an edge, does not promise a lightning counterattack. It only promises you will not be swept away. At the elite level, that is usually all a defensive opening needs to promise. But here there is a large gap. The entire technical content of the product, at least as far as has been published, offers not a single concrete line. No move sequence beyond the first three moves. No engine evaluation. No win–draw–loss percentages from a database. No average centipawn loss figure. Not one line for the buyer to verify. A chess training product without lines is like a match analysis without any phases of play. Someone can speak eloquently, charmingly, with great authority. But the viewer has nothing to check. And this material has a date. It is positioned by a very clear time marker: about twenty-five years after 2026. That places it around 2026. At that point, engine-era Scotch theory had already advanced considerably from the previous decade. At the moment I write these lines, that gap is more than another decade wider. A "counter" drafted in 2026 may still hold at the level of principle. But the concrete lines, the move orders, the middlegame transpositions it points to — if any — are relics. An empty playing hall still keeps the ticking of games long since finished. So why can such a product still sell? Because it relies on something more expensive than data: borrowed authority. The structure of borrowed authority has two layers. The first is a historical name — here, Kasparov and the 2026 game. The second is a title — here, "renowned and successful coach". Combine the two, and the buyer feels he is purchasing a piece of history rather than a sixty-minute video file. What is worth noting is that the second layer is entirely unproven in the promotional text itself. No list of pupils, no tournaments led, no coaching record stated. The credential is asserted, not evidenced. In my trade, a credential without evidence is an unfinished opening sentence. The historical figure, though, is real. Kasparov was born in 2026, reached a peak rating of 2851, and retired in 2026. Karpov peaked around 2780. The 2026 World Championship was the closing chapter of the greatest rivalry of the twentieth century. Those facts need no re-verification. But the distance between "Kasparov played the Scotch in 2026" and "you should buy this video in 2026" is the distance between a historical fact and a commercial inference. The copywriter bridges that distance with a single sentence, and that bridge has no piers. It is a very striking economic model. The chess training-video economy runs on low cost, long lifespan, high margin. A coach with years of accumulated knowledge need only sit before a board for a few hours, speak into a microphone, insert a few diagrams, and the product can be sold for years. No reproduction cost, no injured players, no shifting schedule. Just a static content file and a sales page. In that model, the teacher's reputation is the fixed asset. It does not depreciate with time; it only loses value when someone cross-checks it. Therefore the model has one obvious weakness: it survives only as long as buyers refrain from cross-checking. Today's chess buyer holds tools the 2026 buyer did not. Stronger engines, denser databases, faster online analysis communities. A wrong line is exposed within hours, not months. That means the value of a training product has shifted: people no longer pay for move sequences — those can be looked up for free — but for how the questions are framed. A good coach does not sell you answers. He sells you a sequence of thinking so you can find the answers yourself. This is where Mikhalchishin's video, though I lack enough data to assess its whole content, still leaves a positive signal. The product's positioning — stressing practicality, simplicity, the absence of panic — suggests an intent to teach method rather than rote memory. If so, it still has a place, provided the buyer understands he is receiving a mental framework, not an arsenal. But I must say plainly what my trade obliges me to say. The most romantic mistake of this trade is believing a move can keep its meaning across decades. The Scotch in 2026 carried one meaning: the daring of a champion willing to leave safe theory. The Scotch in 2026 carried another: a popular system requiring disciplined defence. The Scotch in 2026 carries a third: a commercial object mined to exhaustion. The same sequence of moves. Three different souls. And no video can teach a soul. At this point the story turned in a direction I did not expect. When I traced the video's source, I found a headline that did not match the body. The headline mentioned John Donaldson and Bobby Fischer. Those two names appear nowhere in the body of the material. Donaldson is an American International Master, author and chess historian. Fischer was world champion, now deceased. Both belong to an entirely different content line: books, bibliographies, history. The body talks about the Scotch opening and an Eastern European coach. This is the largest contradiction, and in my view, the most writeable point of the whole story. A page whose headline belongs to one article while its body belongs to another. That commonly happens on aggregator pages, where multiple product listings are gathered under one frame, and the top of the page was written by someone else, at another time, for another purpose. To an ordinary reader, that is a small error. To me, it is a metaphor. Chess memory is being recycled faster than people verify it. An author's name, a player's name, an opening's name get mixed together, and within months nobody remembers which belongs to which. Fischer is gone. Donaldson still writes. Kasparov retired twenty-one years ago. Mikhalchishin is selling videos. And the Scotch is still there, on the board, waiting for the next move. The irony is that the video exists precisely because in 2026 someone played a move nobody bothered to record properly. Had I written carefully that day, had I understood what I was seeing, I might have held a document more valuable than any training video produced afterwards. But I closed the notebook and went for coffee. I write about chess to find the self I was twenty years ago. And every time I find him, I see someone younger than me, more reckless than me, and right about me in exactly one respect: he did not try to explain what he had just seen. So, is that video worth buying? My answer: worth watching, but not worth trusting absolutely. Worth watching because a veteran coach's method always has reference value. Not worth trusting absolutely because the material is dated, because it offers no lines to verify, and because it is sold on someone else's reputation rather than its own record. The right way to use such a product is to make it a starting point, not an endpoint. Sit down, watch, note the questions it raises, then go find your own answers with your own engine and database. That is the only way a ten-year-old video remains useful in a year when theory has travelled a very long way further. And this is the last thing I want to say to young players. Do not trust the labels "harmless" or "dangerous". No opening is harmless; there are only openings that have not yet met the right player. The Scotch lay still in the theory drawer for decades, called bland, overlooked, treated as the choice of the lazy. Then one man sat down, pushed a pawn, and the whole industry had to rewrite its books. That does not prove the opening is strong. It proves we read the board worse than we think. As for that video, it will sit in the product catalogue a few more years. People will buy it out of curiosity, out of convenience, because they need a quick fix for Thursday night. And perhaps among them will be a seventeen-year-old in some training room who watches all sixty minutes, then switches off and asks a question the video never answered. That person will not buy the next video. That person will write his own theory. And thirty-five years later, some old reporter will open an old notebook, read a naive line, smile, and write a piece about him — a quarter of a century too late.