The Scotch Game, a Swapped Name, and the Hole in Chess's Archive

One April afternoon in Nha Trang, I opened two things at once on my wooden desk: a VHS tape recording the men's 400m final at the 2026 national athletics championships, and a product catalogue page for a foreign chess publisher. The tape had moulded, the image was blurred, the commentary kept breaking up because the tape had stretched. The catalogue page was glossy, neatly laid out, with a cover image, an author's name, and an italic line of description.

At sixty-five, I have learned one thing: material filed in the wrong drawer is more frightening than material you simply do not have.

On the VHS tape, the boy who ran the 400m that year finished first, with a time nobody bothered to record. On the chess catalogue page, an unfamiliar name sat in the headline — John Donaldson, Bobby Fischer — while everything below it discussed something else entirely: an instructional video on how to counter the Scotch opening, made by coach Adrian Mikhalchishin.

The two events have nothing to do with each other. But together they tell one story: sporting memory, whether stored on magnetic tape or in a digital file, can be filed crooked. And once filed crooked, it stops being memory and becomes merchandise with no guarantor.

The stadium is empty, but the applause of 2026 still rings inside every old record. I wrote that line years ago, when the pandemic shut every stand. Today I want to rewrite it for a chessboard.

To understand why a video about countering the Scotch deserves several thousand words from me, we need to go back thirty-five years.

The Scotch opening arises after three moves: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4. White pushes the d-pawn before castling, accepts an early opening of the centre, and trades quickly to seize the initiative. For most of the twentieth century, the top of the chess world treated it as a harmless system — the sort of opening elite grandmasters play when they want to avoid heavy theory, or when they underrate their opponent. People called it the opening of men with nothing to lose.

Then in 2026, Garry Kasparov took it into a world championship match against Anatoly Karpov. That was the fifth and final match of the Kasparov–Karpov rivalry, staged in New York and Lyon. Kasparov used the Scotch as a surprise weapon, and one such occasion was enough to collapse a prejudice.

Since then, the history of the Scotch has been divided in two: before 2026 and after 2026.

What is striking is that the catalogue page itself admits this, but in a very odd way. It says that before 2026, people believed the Scotch was harmless and rarely played, then immediately retells the Kasparov story to prove the opposite: the Scotch is now a mainstream, respected system, and therefore needs a dedicated product to counter it.

In other words, the product manufactures the threat and then sells the solution. That is a familiar marketing pattern, and commercially it is not wrong. But it raises a question I, as a documentary maker, cannot skip: beyond the 2026 story, what else does this product contain?

The short answer is: very little.

The content page offers no concrete variation. Not a line of theory, not a move sequence, not a single engine evaluation. It merely asserts that the Scotch can be neutralised, adds the author's reassurance that there is no need to panic, and lists a few simple practical tips presented by coach Mikhalchishin.

An opening is treated as dangerous enough that you must buy a counter — yet the counter proves nothing with a single move. That is the crux. In chess, a system's standing is measured by real games at the top, by database frequency, by win-draw-loss ratios, by novelties that have never appeared in print. The page supplies none of those figures.

I call this marketing abstraction: writing pitched at a level of generality high enough that nobody can catch an error, and vague enough that nobody can verify anything.

Technically, the Scotch sits inside the open-game family 1.e4 e5, a family dissected move by move by chess engines. There is no secret there. A video teaching you to counter the Scotch cannot promise a secret weapon; it can only promise a tidy, memorable repertoire, good enough for club players. Had the seller described the product honestly, I would have had nothing to write.

Based on my experience of following and commentating on chess across several decades, I know people verify an opening system with three tools. First, a game database, in which you count how often a variation appears at 2700 level and above. Second, engine match rate — if a player's moves deviate too often from the engine's best choice, we measure it by average centipawn loss, where lower is better. Third, novelty — a move absent from the database, the thing the professionals call new. Without all three, any claim about an opening is just a personal opinion.

The catalogue page provides none of them. So I must record in my notebook: the product's technical quality cannot be assessed from its own promotional text.

But one other thing made me pause longer: the date.

Judging by how the page frames things — twenty-five years after 2026 — the product appeared around 2026. That is the most technically important detail, and the least noticed.

Chess opening theory does not stand still. From 2026 to now, engines such as Stockfish and Leela have changed how almost every open system is assessed. Lines considered stable a decade ago may have been overturned. An anti-Scotch method written in 2026 is not wrong, but it belongs to a different technical moment.

If I take that course and teach it to a student today without cross-checking, I am teaching someone else's memory instead of teaching chess.

There is one more detail, and it is the one that made me open my notebook.

The headline reads: John Donaldson: New insights into Bobby Fischer. Donaldson is an American international master, author and noted chess historian. Bobby Fischer was the 2026 world champion, regarded as the greatest chess genius of the twentieth century. Both names sit very naturally together.

Yet in the entire body of the page, Donaldson does not appear once. Nor does Fischer. No game, no book, no historical document involving either of them. Everything concerns Mikhalchishin, the Scotch, and an instructional video.

This is a complete mismatch between headline and body.

There are three possibilities. One, a metadata error — someone pasted the wrong title when publishing. Two, the source page aggregates several products, with the headline belonging to one item and the body to another. Three, it is an advertisement filed under the wrong name.

All three possibilities lead to the same conclusion: this source has no one accountable for its integrity.

For a documentary maker like me, that is not trivial. In my trade, one frame tagged with the wrong shooting date can bring down a whole film. One witness recorded under the wrong name can turn three months of interviews into nothing. We hold one unbreakable rule: every fact must be traceable to a source, and that source must be a person or an institution that can be confronted.

The catalogue page fails that rule.

In the age of the 30-second video, I spent three months listening to one man talk about the 400m of 2026. I say that to my students whenever they want me to reach a conclusion too fast. Those three months taught me that a fact without a source is not a fact; it is a rumour dressed up well.

From here, I want to speak directly to what I consider more important than the Scotch itself.

The chess content industry lives on a model in which the coach becomes the brand. Someone with credentials, a competitive past, or a name in coaching circles puts their name to a roughly sixty-minute video about a single opening. Such products are cheap to make, sell for years, and live off the reputation of the name on the cover.

The model is not bad. It democratises knowledge, letting club players in Nha Trang or Can Tho access the thinking of a coach who has worked at world level. But it has a structural weakness: the teacher's reputation substitutes for verification of the content.

When you buy a theory book, you can open it, check every line against an engine, judge for yourself. When you buy a video, you trust the speaker. And when the promotional page for that video carries the misattributed name of a distinguished chess historian, that trust is built on sand.

Vietnam is entering this model too. Online chess classes are springing up everywhere. Young coaches teach over Zoom and sell courses through social media. I do not object. I only want to recall something I learned from my shelf of VHS tapes: a record never grows old; it is only waiting for someone who knows how to listen. But to listen, you must first know what the tape actually recorded.

Today's generation of Vietnamese players — Le Quang Liem, Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son, Dao Thien Hai — all grew up reading foreign material. The children of Nha Trang do the same now. They open a video, trust the voice inside it, and memorise a line the way they would memorise a truth. If that line comes from a crooked source, the crookedness will follow them through their whole career.

On the question of the teacher's authority, there is a point I want to dwell on longer.

The page calls Mikhalchishin a renowned and successful coach. In chess circles, Adrian Mikhalchishin is a Ukrainian grandmaster from the old Soviet training tradition, who has served on coaching teams for strong players and appears in books on chess training. That reputation has a basis.

But here is what I want you to notice: the page offers no evidence for it. No student names, no tournaments, no titles coached, no specific honours. Only an adjective: renowned and successful.

In my trade we call this borrowed authority. It is not false, but it is not enough. And when a promotional page makes borrowed authority its entire foundation, I am entitled to ask: remove the name, and what is left of the product?

The answer, once again, is: a promise.

I want to tell a small story that seems off-topic and is not off-topic at all.

Late in 2026, when every competition was suspended, I sat in Nha Trang, frustrated at having nothing to film. While clearing a storeroom, I found an old VHS tape about Nguyen Thi Minh Phuong, the 800m runner who once clocked 1:58, and who was struck from the 2026 Olympic squad list because of an administrative error.

I video-called twelve veteran athletes of her era, stitched their memories together, and made the documentary Empty Stadiums – Frozen Dreams.

What I learned from that process was not editing technique. It was this: every stadium I walk through has a hidden door, and the entrance is always a person. When you stitch together the memories of twelve people, you obtain a truth no official document can hold. But when you have only one person, and that person is selling you a product, you have a viewpoint, not a truth.

That chess catalogue page had only one person. One who speaks, one who sells, one who names the page.

Now we come to what I consider the most counter-intuitive part.

People will assume this piece is about chess. I do not think so. This piece is about archives.

The Scotch is only a pretext. The misattributed name in the headline is only a pretext. What I really want to say is this: we are building a vast layer of sporting memory on bricks that carry no builder's name.

In chess this is especially dangerous, because chess is the sport of memory. A game does not exist in the present; it exists in databases, in books, in players' heads. If the input data is off, even only in a headline, every conclusion drawn from it is off too, and that error gets handed to the next generation as fact.

I have seen this in athletics. An athlete's performance recorded half a second wrong, and twenty years later a whole generation remembers her wrongly. Nobody meant it. It was a small error, then copied, then taken as standard.

A transfer is not a story about money; it is a symphony of fates pushed aside. I wrote that line for football, but it holds for chess knowledge too. Every time a line of theory is filed under the wrong author, a piece of intellectual fate is pushed into a drawer that is not its own.

Whether the video is good or bad, that is for viewers to judge. The greater worry is that nobody checked.

I want to be fair. Some hypotheses make this affair far more benign than it looks.

Perhaps the source page is simply an aggregation page: a headline from one item accidentally fell onto the body of another, through a content-management error. Anyone who has run a website knows this happens daily. In that case, no one intended to deceive.

I also want to be clear: Mikhalchishin is almost certainly a real, competent coach, and his product most likely belongs to a short-form sixty-minute video series from a well-known chess publisher. Such series share common features: one opening, one topic, about an hour, presented with board diagrams and arrows for the moves. That kind of product is useful to club learners.

The problem lies neither with Mikhalchishin, nor with John Donaldson or Bobby Fischer. It lies in the editing stage — the stage where, in my trade, three people sit and re-check a single frame.

I once sat in an edit suite in Nha Trang, revising a documentary segment fourteen times, all because a street sign in the background carried the wrong street name. The final product ran 47 minutes. If I told an investor about that sign, they would think me mad. But if, ten years later, someone watches that film and finds the right street, that sign is the whole guide.

That is why a wrong headline matters to me.

On the purely technical side, there are a few points I want to record as a checklist so future readers can look them up.

On technical dating: an anti-Scotch course written around 2026 is, by the time I write this, more than a decade old. Chess opening theory has changed substantially in that period under the influence of engines. Anyone using this course should re-check every line against a current database before putting it into practice.

On verifiability: the page states no move beyond the first three of the Scotch, no statistics, no sample games. That makes the product's real technical quality impossible to assess from the promotion alone.

On authority: the coach's name is given without a single concrete achievement. To a documentary maker, a name without achievements is only a name.

On commercial pattern: the product manufactures the threat by declaring an opening dangerous, then sells the solution. That pattern is legitimate but should be read with awareness of whose interest it serves.

On the historical event invoked: the 2026 Kasparov–Karpov match was the fifth and final world championship contest between the two, staged in New York and Lyon. It is a real, widely documented event. Kasparov used the Scotch there as a tactical surprise, and that genuinely shaped how the chess world later assessed the opening.

Those five points are where anyone wishing to verify this article can begin.

I want to close with the one thought worth carrying away from this story.

In the whole affair, the only thing certainly true is Kasparov's game of 2026. Everything else — the name in the headline, the promise of neutralisation, the reputation without achievements — is a layer painted on top of it.

Layers are not always bad. Sometimes they bring a newcomer closer to an opening he has never heard of. But a layer must not swallow the core. And the core, in every sport, is always a specific person, at a specific moment, doing a specific thing — and everything else is rewritten around him.

Kasparov sat across from Karpov in 2026. That is the core.

John Donaldson and Bobby Fischer never sat together on that page. Yet their names share one headline, and someone will read that line and believe it.

I write this to remind myself, and to remind those who record things: every time we put the wrong name at the top of a story, we take from someone — perhaps a historian, perhaps an 800m runner erased by an administrative error — the right to be remembered correctly.

Chess is the only sport in which memory itself is the arena. There, no stand is ever empty. There, every old move is still waiting to be called by its right name.

And I, at sixty-five, am still sitting here, opening my notebook again, waiting for the next person to tell me a story.