Hello! I started with Chessmood few weeks ago and managed to go trough some of the opening analysis. I am impressed by the excellent work of our GM-s but naturally, I have also some questions. So lets start with the CK: One of my friends, very strong Fide Master and notorious adherent of CK defence, played me last weekend in quick games an interesting line: 1.e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3.exd5 cxd5 4. Bd3 Nc6 5.c3 Qc7 6.Ne2 e6, leaving Bc8 at home. I reacted logicaly 7.Bf4 Bd6 8. Bxd6 Qxd6 9.0-0 Ne7 10.Nd2 Bd7, and here I tryed it either with 11.f4 or 11.Qc2, following our model plans, but with some sensible defence ( 0-0, sometimes f6 and e5, sometimes f5 and transfer of the knight to e4) black allways succeded to hold his symbolically worse position. Later I had a look to my database with engine on, but I did not find any serious way to endanger black position. Is this just a limit of this line or do you have any idea to keep the initiative for white side? Thx for your kind reactions!
Excellent question Martin, I have been wondering this myself and started a thread about a month ago to bring it to the attention of the ChessMood Team [Thread Here: https://chessmood.com/forum/main-channel/caro-kann-advance-section]. To be honest I haven't checked back on this line for awhile, White has more space but black is very solid with no weaknesses, and it is hard for White to make any meaningful progress. Perhaps white should try to probe the queenside at some point with a4, or even slowly prepare to advance on both wings, the danger though is in becoming too ambitious and overextending your position.
Lets hope the combined ChessMood team can eventually find some more promising ideas and concrete lines to combat Black's resilient setup. I'm curious where your FM friend found this idea, as thankfully to date this setup is still quite rare at Master level in comparison to some other more dynamic approaches.
Hi Martin, it seems our styles are very simliar since I too think the 2 Knight's line is very interesting to play against the Caro and I have a lot of analysis on it. Yes I have watched The Butcher's You Tube video on the line and it's not bad at all, but some of Black's important options he does not consider, also since his video was released there have been many important developments and discoveries for both White and Black.
The DVD where I saw the idea used by your FM Friend was: The Dynamic Caro-Kann
