Courses (62)

Over the past few decades, the Advance Variation has become one of White's most flexible weapons against the Caro-Kann. After 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.e5, White usually gets to choose the character of the fight: a slow build-up with 4.Nf3, an aggressive 4.h4, a sharp 4.Nc3 with g4, or an early 4.g4.
The underlying idea of this course is simple and demanding: take that choice away. With 3...c5, Black strikes at the center at once and moves the game onto his own terms.

From intuition to system
Capablanca played the Caro-Kann by feel. Mikhail Botvinnik took the same opening, studied it, built it into a system, and carried it into World Championship matches. Without him, the Caro-Kann as it is played today would not exist.
That is the thread GM Pier Luigi Basso follows in the second part of his Caro-Kann Legacies series. He traces the modern opening back to Botvinnik, game by game.

There is a paradox every Caro-Kann player knows. The Classical and the Advance are the most critical tests, yet many games never reach them.
White plays 2.Nf3, 2.d3, 2.d4 with 3.f3, or the Two Knights, and the theoretical battle you prepared for disappears. These lines are less critical on paper, but they show up all the time in practice.
The Modern Caro-Kann: A Complete Repertoire for Black – Part 3 is built on a clear goal. Black should not simply survive these sidelines. Black should be happy to see them.

This course, Part 2 of The Modern Caro-Kann, offers a complete Black repertoire against the Advance Variation, built around GM Szymon Gumularz's ambitious 7...c4!? in the Short System, which keeps pieces on the board and plays for a win rather than settling for a theoretical endgame. Across 15 chapters, it provides concrete answers to every major White setup after 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.e5 Bf5, guided by the principle that Black should never settle for equality when a fighting alternative exists.

Capablanca learned the Caro-Kann without a single engine line to lean on. He trusted structure, harmony, and the endgame, and in the 1920s and 30s he turned an opening still dismissed as second-rate into a defense he could rely on against the strongest players in the world.
That is the thread GM Pier Luigi Basso follows here. He reads Capablanca's games as a diagnostic tool: the moments where the third World Champion's intuition already pointed to what modern theory confirms, and, just as revealing, the moments where he stopped short of ideas that would only be discovered decades later.

The Caro-Kann has spent a century as the opening players reach for when they want to be hard to beat. The structure stays healthy, the light-squared bishop escapes before ...e6 shuts it in, and there are very few ways for White to force matters over the board. That reputation is deserved — but it has also turned the opening into a synonym for quiet, and that is the reputation this repertoire sets out to revise.
The Modern Caro-Kann: A Complete Repertoire for Black – Part 1
This course by GM Szymon Gumularz and FM Sebastian Reimann rests on a single conviction: solid does not have to mean passive. The repertoire keeps everything that makes the Caro-Kann reliable, then looks for the ambition in each position — the moment where Black can play for more than a draw. Part 1 is devoted entirely to the Classical Variation, White's most respected reply for a hundred years and the line any Caro-Kann player has to know first.

For decades, meeting the Caro-Kann with 3.e5 was treated as the modest reply. Releasing the central tension so early seemed to hand Black the very thing the opening is chosen for — a light-squared bishop developed to f5 in the open air, before ...e6 ever shuts it in. Nigel Short's advocacy in the early 1990s reshaped that judgment, showing that White's extra space in the Advance Variation is a lasting asset rather than a concession.
Crushing the Caro-Kann with 3.e5: White's Space Advantage, the new course by IM Deboushnik De, extends that idea instead of repeating it. Where Short built the space advantage slowly, this repertoire expands on both wings and starts posing questions from move four, aiming to deny Black the settled, comfortable game the Caro-Kann promises.

Every repertoire has a line the author quietly hopes nobody plays. For GM Luis Supi, it was the Panov — and he is unusually honest about how close it came to ending his relationship with the Caro-Kann altogether.
The problem was not that Black stands worse. Equalising against 4.c4 has never been hard. The problem was everything after that: positions with no realistic way to play for a win, and equality that felt dry enough that a strong technical player could still generate problems from it. For a player who chooses his openings by how much fight they contain, that was not good enough.
Caro-Kann according to Supi — Part 2 is the result of several months spent solving exactly that.

Some positions are settled not because anyone proved them, but because everybody plays the same move. After 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Nf6 5.Nxf6+ exf6 6.c3, the bishop goes to d6. It has gone to d6 for decades. In Caro-Kann according to Supi, GM Luis Supi asks what happens if it does not — and answers with 6...g6, a move that looks ugly for about ten seconds and then starts to look obvious.

The Caro-Kann has spent most of its life being praised for the wrong thing. Solid. Sound. Structurally impeccable. All true — and all of it has left the opening with a reputation as the defence you choose when a draw would do. GM Abdulla Gadimbayli picked it up for precisely the opposite reason.
He is candid about how he arrived there. A grandmaster from Azerbaijan rated 2524, he spent much of his career struggling for a reliable answer to 1.e4 — and his style, by his own account, has never leaned towards solid games. For a long time the answer was 1...e6. Then he turned to 1...c6, and found something he had not expected: an opening offering an unusual number of ways for Black to play for the win. This course is the result of that work, and his first for Modern Chess.