The Black Lion - Aggressive?

GM Williams calls his Black Lion Aggressive or an Aggressive version of the Philidor. What does he mean by calling it aggressive? It seems the only time it becomes aggressive is when White moves a pawn in front of its King, and then Black attack with its g pawn and hopes to mate the king up that side. Quite often it does not go that way.
What does he mean by Aggressive? True or just a sales pitch?

It's a sales gimmick for a subpar opening.

Yeah, I'd heard someone else say that.
I have mixed feelings about it. I'm about 50/50 with it.
When they DO move that h3 pawn up, you usually have a good game. I like it when they pull some bizarre opening I don't know...like the Grob or Sniper.

Why not just play one of the standard openings? They're standard for a reason.

Maybe you should try the English Opening....

;)

"Why not just play one of the standard openings? They're standard for a reason."
It is the other way around. Once a top player plays a "subpar" opening it becomes standard.
The scotch was subpar until Kasparov played it, the Berlin was subpar until Kramnik played it, the London, Colle, Trompovsky, Italian were subpar until Carlsen played it. Alekhine Defence and Pirc were subpar until Fischer played it.

tpr, I respectfully disagree.

The Scotch and Berlin became more popular due to better theory and re-evaluation of the openings. In essence, we discovered that they are actually pretty good.

The Italian is a sort of similar case. When it's played today by GMs, it's usually d3 lines that look like a closed Ruy, not classical Moeller attack stuff and the like.

The London, Colle, and Trompowsky don't seem to offer more than equality. (If you have an argument that this is not the case, I am genuinely interested in hearing it!) For example, the lichess database has black outscoring white after 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Bf4 c5, and the Stockfish evaluation at 0. This is horrible. If you're going to go through the trouble of booking up, why learn something that tosses the first move advantage away after 3 moves?

The Alekhine and Pirc are objectively not that great, and there's a reason they're mostly used as secondary defenses or surprise weapons. I can pull some critical lines from e.g. the Alekhine from the chesspub forums if you doubt this. Further, they're poor choices for a middling player online because of their hypermodern nature. They require some fancy footwork and theoretical knowledge to play accurately and not get rolled. (This last point is perhaps debatable, but it was the opinion of the late NM Mark Morss, who advocated more classical and open openings for developing players. He managed to produce a national high school champion, Abby Marshall, so I take his thoughts seriously.)

So again, if you're a club player and have little study time, why not just pick a single good opening as white and one response each to e4 and d4? Why intentionally learn bad openings?

Greg Shahade has a nice list of top quality openings here:
http://www.uschess.org/content/view/11634/675

"If you really want you can play the Alekhine’s Defense every game, or the London system for white, though I’d never recommend these to any of my students as a primary opening choice."

Also:

"You can play stuff that’s completely unsound because the large majority of sub 2000 players won’t be able to take advantage of your dubious opening choices. Understand that if your goals change, you may need to learn something new according to your new ambitions. If this is only a short term goal, and at some point in the future you’d like to become even stronger, you will be cheating yourself by not immediately learning more serious variations."

I think we all want to become stronger...

"I think we all want to become stronger..."
There is little relation between strength and opening choice.
For example there are grandmasters that play the black lion as main defence. The same for Alekhine's Defence.

Fischer started out with the Najdorf Sicilian, the King's Indian Defence as black and the Ruy Lopez as white form age 12 and played these his whole career.

"if you're a club player and have little study time, why not just pick a single good opening as white and one response each to e4 and d4?" Because the "good" openings have much more known theory, so require so much more study time to be at the same knowledge level as opponents. It is much more effective to play a side line.

"why learn something that tosses the first move advantage away after 3 moves" Present play by Carlsen seems to indicate that objectively there is no such thing as a first move advantage. That is why he plays Colle, Trompovsky, London it top events and in World Championship matches. You can spend your time mastering the Berlin and Marshall variations of the Ruy Lopez, but only to discover that after all these analysis there is no real white advantage either. So it makes sense to play something different and force the opponent to think for himself instead of reproducing book lines.

I let Stockfish 8 run for more than 24 hours looking at all 20 first moves simultaneously. It reached a 42 ply depth. There was almost no difference for e4, d4, c4, b3, and Nf3. With super grand master chess engines and 16 gigabyte 3.4 GHz dual core computers available at working man prices, the belief in standard opening superiority and first move advantage have pretty much become myths. Book up on solid little known lines. If Stockfish 8 says it is good at 33 fix ply depth, it is worth getting to know thoroughly. But you have to be willing to deep analyze your losses often and build on what works for you. I use an opening tree built from Chessbase's Big 2017 database to spar against Stockfish 8 at 33 fix ply depth. I am very pleased with the results. Some “standard line” from “standard openings” are not nearly as safe as grand masters once thought 20 years ago. Kasparov found this out when he lost the World Championship to Kramnik. At that time Kramnik was traveling with 5 of the fastest computer towers he could reasonably afford. All the top rated players book with computers now.

Yes, well said. It does not matter what opening you play, it matters how you play afterwards.
To come back to the original question in the title, the black lion is a solid opening, but black should be defensive and not lash out with ...g5 too soon. Example: