Jobava, the Move 5.e5, and the Echo from Samarkand

The day I reopened Daniel King's video, the board had only just shown its fifth move. No brilliant stroke, no miracle. Just a white pawn pushing to e5, as decisive as a hammer striking stone. Baadur Jobava sat on one side, and across from him was a name that never appears anywhere in the film. That was the first thing that made me stop. A win labelled 'stunning' in which no one bothers to name the loser — in my trade, that silence is rarely accidental. It tells you the story's centre of gravity is not the game, but the move. The context is familiar almost to the point of boredom. The game follows the Italian Game: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4, and then Black answers 3...Nf6, steering into the Two Knights complex. That is old territory, where people have argued for centuries about whether White should stay quiet or set the board on fire. The move 5.e5! that King analyses is not a new invention. It usually arrives through the Scotch Gambit gateway: 3.d4 exd4 4.Bc4. Same position, two roads. In chess, that means the idea has outlived many of the players who use it. Players like Sveshnikov employed it regularly. In other words, this is heritage, not a scoop. And perhaps that is exactly why it is worth discussing. What I want to pause on is this: the value of 5.e5 does not lie in novelty but in the asymmetry between risk and reward. King calls it 'sharp' and 'full of traps'. But the more important phrase is that it is 'relatively easy to learn'. For a club player, that is the golden pairing: learn fast, trouble your opponent fast. White poses problems from the centre immediately, forcing Black to choose between three main branches — 5...d5, 5...Ng4, and 5...Ne4 — none of which, according to King, grants Black a straightforward equaliser. I call that a repertoire stance, not a proven evaluation. The film offers no engine match rate, no ACPL, no complete game score. It offers a verdict: 'Problems are being posed.' And that verdict holds — within the limits it claims for itself. This is where I want to turn. I have followed Jobava's games for nearly twenty years, from open tournaments in Europe to team matches. He is the kind of player whose collective memory always gets wrong. People remember Jobava for his bizarre moves, his ideas that leap fences, as if he played to shock. But follow him long enough and you see something else: he plays to reclaim the initiative from positions that theory seemed to have frozen shut. King's choice of exactly one of his wins to reteach 5.e5 is no coincidence. It is a stream-of-consciousness reading: turning an old memory into a weapon of the present. That metaphor reminds me of moves I once watched at old tournaments. Back then we took notes not on machines but with pencils broken at the tip. Every game was a sequence of forgetting and remembering. When the board closes, memory starts scoring. Old games return not because they are beautiful but because they are useful. Sveshnikov left behind a body of analysis that engines now confirm in part, but what engines cannot leave behind is the feeling of facing it for the first time. That feeling is not in any database. That is the blind spot of collective memory I want to name: we sanctify the 'new move' and dismiss the 'old move retold at the right moment'. 5.e5 does not win the game. The way Jobava handled Black after the theoretical door closed wins it. King, like every good commentator, knows this. But the headline — 'stunning win' — accidentally swaps the two. A beautiful move makes a lesson; a beautiful game makes an event. They do not always coincide. There is another risk, far less romantic, that I am obliged to raise. The popularisation tax. An opening line that enters an instructional video with a large audience will be reverse-engineered before you can use it a third time. Trap lines live on surprise; the more glory, the faster it drains. If anyone intends to make 5.e5 their main weapon, I advise keeping it as a secondary one. Keep it in the inside pocket, not up your sleeve. And one more thing. In the middle of the transfer window, where noise drowns signal, we are used to reading everything through contract value. 'The transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope.' Chess has no such market, but it has another, quieter one: the market of study. Wins become syllabi. Syllabi become well-trodden paths. And a well-trodden path always holds a trap for whoever walks it last. I do not know which event Samarkand was. The film mentions only the city. I do not know Jobava's opponent, the date, or the format. For someone in my trade, those three facts are not small details. They are the skeleton. But they do not make the lesson less valuable. They only repeat something experience has taught me: sometimes, 'the old bird understands that landing, too, is a way of flying'. Jobava did not land with a new move. He landed by remembering an old one. The worthwhile question is not whether 5.e5 is strong. It is: how many times do we ignore a good idea simply because it has existed longer than we have? In chess, as in life, what gets forgotten is rarely what is weak. It is merely what makes its noise more slowly.