Let’s continue our Essential Strategy series on the Caro-Kann. We’ve covered the Advance variations. But what happens if they instead capture our pawn early?

Well, we’ll capture to start of course. Then we’ll put our pieces on good square and play for an initiative.

After we capture back, if white plays the immediate c4, we’re in Panov territory. We have a fun setup to play here, and we’re going to temporarily gambit a pawn. White will develop their knights, and we’ll follow suit.

After all four knights are in the mix, we come to our ChessGoals wrinkle.

Yeah! a6!! Your opponents will think this is a wasted move. They’ll think we don’t know what to do in the position so we’re just playing a waiting move. But they’re wrong, we’re still in book of course. Our full course will cover many set ups here. But we’ll take a look at what happens after they capture on d5.

We’re going to capture back with the knight (of course) then if Bc4 we’ll defend the knight with Be6. We play the bishop to e6 in many of these lines with the idea of fianchettoing the dark square bishop to attack the weak pawn on d4.

If white decides to castle here. We can win a piece. Nxc3 hits the queen and attacks the bishop on c4, which is now lost. Instead, white will retreat the bishop. We’ll chase it back further with Na5, then fianchetto our dark squared bishop to focus on the d4 weakness.

This is where we’ll leave the position. Stockfish gives a pretty equal position. Or a slight pull for black. However, the club database gives a win 63% of the time for black here, and just 30% for white. Let’s check out the plans.

We can capture on c3 and play against the hanging pawns with Bg7, O-O, and Rc8. We keep control of the d5 and c4 squares. The position is pretty easy to play for black.

We cover several other lines of the Exchange Variation in our course. Check it out now or try it for free.