CRUSH the Caro-Kann with this RARE Two Knights Sideline

and you play the two knights attack against the carl khan you know the hillbilly attack okay so a lot of people are asking about the karo khan ryan is asking do you know any rare sidelines in the carl con okay yeah it seems like there's a lot of interest in the karo khan tonight so we're gonna have to take a break from this theory and let's let's do a little something on um on the carl con because i actually do have something a little bit special that i think a lot of people will will actually get something out of um and other people were asking about the two nights so there is a line in the two nights that i think is uh let's just put this on the board there's this line in the two nights after bishop to g4 where right now i think we're looking at if you look in the master database you'll see that there's essentially only one move and that's pawn to h3 but there's also this really rare move bishop to e2 which i actually really like it looks kind of like a beginner move um i really like this move because it it's really quiet and it just looks like a beginner move it looks like i'm just developing my pieces maybe i don't really know what i'm doing but it's actually quite dangerous and there's a lot of different ways that white can play it gives you a range of possibilities but also it's i don't know it's just so what i'm trying to say is that there actually are like there's just so many traps that people actually fall for so i think if we turn the master database off and we actually look at the leeches database which will have the average rated games of just anybody that's played only chess at any time control this will actually give us a good idea of exactly how many people have fallen for how many of these traps the main lines if we remember from the master database it was definitely e6 and knight to f6 and both of these are actually closely related but basically we should we should check out all of these lines beautiful blue sweater jonathan there also exists there's one thing i was practicing for this i was actually practicing this earlier today even somebody made one of like the biggest mistakes that you can make somebody played d4 uh i wonder if i can actually i can turn this off i guess when i need to but hopefully everybody can see why d4 is bad but even a lot of really strong players uh have fallen for this the reason this loses is because you actually just straight up blunder upon so not knight e5 but actually knight takes d4 here and a lot of people mess this up if you look you know this is like a 2700 these are two 2700s there's 2800s and 2600s so a lot i mean a lot of high rated players 2 700 as has played it a lot of people have made this big mistake so even strong players might just overlook the fact that if you take here we take back with our knight it is nice um and if queen takes which i think is what my opponent played then you take care and this is actually way worse so something like this and i played like this and i got castled and i kicked the queen away something like this though is actually way worse than it seems it's not just a pawn it's gonna be like plus two like that's such an important pawn this central d-pawn that uh it actually makes the evaluation so high it's actually really really bad for black but so returning to that so there's one trap there you go 700 people have fallen for it uh 712 people to be exact and there's a lot of other things that seem to happen i've had this three times now the other two times people played this really annoying move uh which is just a take why is the pawn so critical so without this everything actually kind of tumbles so for example i think this is how the game went something like this but now eventually we're going to get d4 so in the game i got like castled and eventually i moved my knights somewhere and i played c3 and d4 and white just gets this huge center and it just wasn't easy for black to in any way contest the center and eventually i just rolled him over on the king's side with a big attack so but yeah bishop e2 being a beginner looking move is as half the ploy you want to play moves that look like you don't know what you're doing and then really have studied them quite deeply this one though i've faced twice now and this one is kind of annoying i think all you can really do i mean you could you could really book up on this but the simplest solution and i'm really looking for like an easy simple solution to follow is to kind of fall back on the the basic principles of the pawn structure but uh here so what you can do is essentially there's a lot of different potential ways this could happen most likely this will probably lead to a kappa blanca pawn structure and that of course is after for example e6 d4 and there's a lot of different move orders in a lot of different plans but you'll probably most likely get something similar to this where if you trade for example and play c4 which you don't necessarily need to do if you take a look it does score very well this exact pawn structure is the kappa blanca pawn structure so this exactly which you mostly get out of the carl khan i guess you could get it out of like a slav is is a very well-known pawn structure and essentially white will you know continue just developing the stuff bringing some queens in bringing stuff in or you might play with lines with like b3 putting your your guy over here essentially what's important in the middle game is going to be what to do with your puns eventually if white gets a million free turns they will blast open everything with a move like d5 and for black's point of view it's almost always c5 is the break that black's gonna need to go for um e5 is just less likely to happen because there's probably a knight here there's probably a rook here there's probably a bishop that went over here um but you always want to be able to meet this with either taking and then you're gonna get a pawn structure where you have the three on two or you want to be able to meet this with d5 so every single move uh basically be alert that c5 might be coming for black and just try to make sure you have a good response but this one is annoying it's not bad like nothing about this is bad like this is just it's always going to be slightly better for white it's not a theoretical challenge white just has more space and a lot more activity but black just says i've already traded a minor piece and okay i'm a little bit cramped but whatever eventually maybe i can play c5 break out and uh you know so this is this is probably the most annoying line at least for me that you can face and the most annoying line you're slightly better so you can't argue with that too too much okay so back to our main position here we're looking at the two knights with bishop to e2 and another mistake i mean or at least to move this just doesn't make any sense is bishop takes f3 and i'm actually a bit curious i mean it's almost 2 000 people have done this which also makes me wonder i haven't checked yet but i just had a thought maybe this is because they're playing like bullet and they're just pre-moving this they just expect h3 yeah okay so maybe you guys think it might be a pre-move um or are people actually doing this on purpose like it's like a bullet thing okay so if you take pull it out it goes down it's still a thousand plus people uh it doesn't go down that much but i think yes people people are doing this on purpose people are playing bishop takes f3 on purpose which we should allow white is usually willing in this position to play h3 and spend an entire turn begging black to give up the bishop but a lot of people are doing this even in like longer games but it just doesn't really make any sense to give up the bishop here for no real reason um one possibility might be that they're playing d4 if they play something like this i assume we just played d4 and now they'll never get anything and we just have the two bishops for no real reason they go here we can play e5 we can get castled something like this just looks like it's going to be slightly better i'm going to say like 0.8.9 this is just going to be a better position for whites because you get the two bishops for no reason and you still have more space you still have all the pluses with zero of the minuses um but maybe the point is to play d4 and it looks like most people here basically everybody plays knight to e2 possibly going to g3 and just staying focused on the pawn structures holy cow holy cow the saint louis chess club best chess club in the world the most popular move is d4 and we've been discussing a lot of the different pawn structures and how uh how you can think about it in terms of what is going to happen next if you're looking for like a middle game plan what you might want to do is examine what's going to happen next so it seems like this is the most common move but i think if i'm looking at this now for the the very first time welcome to the st louis crew jonathan is really cool despite this karo khan stuff this is excellent carl khan stuff uh so to my mind when i'm looking at this and i'm thinking about it from the point of view of the pawn structure what it appears to me is that the next few moves obviously i got to move my knights somewhere but before i decide i'm thinking in my head this pawn is going to go to e5 this pawn is going to go to c5 and black's gonna have a lot more space on this side of the board so obviously black should in the future in the middle game uh start playing over on that side of the board i'm playing as white i got this pawn on e4 i got a lot more space over here so i'm going to move my knight somewhere but my follow-up moves are probably going to be d3 and hopefully a move like pawn to f4 in my mind i'm thinking i have to play g3 bishop g2 pawn to f4 something like that so i think there's a true case to be made for a move like knight to b1 the point is we're going to get a structure like this and i'm noticing this square we're going to get like a reversed king's indian structure where i think something like even a4 okay it's not that any of these are necessarily all the main lines but to my way of thinking i feel like some position like this where we both get castled we're gonna end up with some structure like this where even here white should retain some advantage because you know g3 bishop g2 we play f4 we can always rely on the two bishops this knight is pretty annoying kind of stopping all the stuff that's going on on the queen side uh so i don't know i feel like this would be one very reasonable way okay but bishop e2 not h3 and now it's time to cover the real stuff so we've had a look at the blunder we've had a look at the kind of boring kind of annoying line where white is a little bit better and we've had a look at this move which is probably just not really good but we still have the main stuff to cover the strongest moves um that if you look in a master database and you run this with an engine that they're going to tell you are e6 and knight to f6 they're most likely going to transpose for example if knight to f6 it goes e5 normally something like this happens and then comes d4 likewise here the main line itself is e6 and here we can play d4 that's our option and if knight to f6 we can force them to go back there are some mistakes that black can make related to the e6 square there are some good reasons like eventually if we can play e5 and e6 black should uh should be a little bit cautious about it so for example if we play e5 now and they don't go back and instead they just leap forward into this square i think already there are some lines that get really really really dangerous and there's one that's really cool there's actually a computer line here that is it's pretty fascinating where both sides kind of trap their own pieces and it goes like this we capture the knight they take us back knight to g5 and this is one of the main squares for our knight after this uh capture it's we just get a lot of activity if they do decide to capture us here it's not a very good move but it's been played a lot and score's really good for white usually white's just going to win this pawn back if they decide to capture here but if they decide to go back we can actually now hit him with this move pawn to e6 and after here check is one of the moves g6 g4 and you get this weird position where there's pieces that are mutually trapped this guy's trapped that guy's trapped but it will end up being good for white for example i think the computer move was queen to d5 but here you can play c4 with the idea of removing the queen from where the knight is so if black does capture here you take this and then getting to take this with a pawn because the queen isn't is no longer attacking our knights is super useful and something like this is just plus two plus one equal plus two point four computers got no idea how good this is it's really good for white though this is really good for white um it's not gonna be easy for black to defend this but okay so that's like one of the things that can happen it's really rare what almost always happens if you're playing somebody that actually if they know any theory at all they're going to play e6 and then you can hear play d4 and after knight to f6 we enter a period where now i feel like it's best there's a ton of lines that you can actually choose i feel like it might be best to just kind of show a variety of different choices so that people can kind of pick for themselves the simplest solution in my mind is to play e5 and knight to g5 and that's definitely the main line both in the master database and the leaches database and then there's also h3 and i think so if you're trying to win i think h3 might be the way to go what's weird about this opening is that after after this move let's just put these on the board we'll come back to h3 after this position there are like a lot of lines that just lead to a perpetual however when actual humans play it's very rarely a perpetual like for some reason like if there's not even that many more moves like if somebody looked it up they would know but just from my experience everybody just falls for all the traps however you are taking a gamble because this is objectively going to lead to a perpetual especially after taking here if you take back with the queen it should be a draw however it's so tricky that it rarely is and there's also a case to be made for taking with a knight so we should look at this line as well so there's still a couple lines to look at here after queen takes e2 we are now we actually this is the point of our whole opening the whole opening conception is we put a bishop on e2 we play knight to g5 we let them trade so that now our queen can come into the game and so here you know the knight can't actually defend on f6 like you would like to in a lot of positions so blank does need to be really careful and you need to deal with the fact that we're playing queen to h5 for example you need to play h6 or bishop to e7 and both of these actually should lead to draws uh some people it looks like have actually played c5 so a move like this actually will let us demonstrate why this is just so dangerous and c5 is just like you're not doing anything white has absolutely no threats and i'm just going to do what i want strategically i want to play knight to c6 i want to play queen to b6 i want to attack this d-pawn and win it look at your knight it ran away from the d-pawn so some players might be tempted to play a move like c5 but the fact that we have this attack and the fact that you've just given us access to these dark squares with the move knight to b5 is going to be catastrophic for example queen to h5 where it looks like everybody has played queen to e7 which may or may not be an improvement over g6 uh but the point is we're going to be going here then in either case whether white starts with queen to f3 or whether we we go here fishing for g6 first and then put our queen on f3 attacking this pawn is going to give us very serious chances so queen to e7 for example defending this pawn but now that you're blocking this bishop in knight to b5 so this is just this is just horrible this is uh plus five this is gonna be like you're gonna lose a rook at least right it might be worse plus four uh something like this is just horrific this is really bad for for black obviously um so that's not something that we need to worry about what we do need to know is since we are threatening queen to h5 what happens if they play bishop b7 or h6 so h6 there i know that there is this line queen to h5 i don't know it very well uh i know this move is just the simple draw if you take here it's check king e7 and then you just keep checking you can play bishop g5 but it shouldn't be any good two people have actually blundered their queens here so you can you can hope for that but it's not likely uh but for example if you go here i think it doesn't work out if you play bishop to g5 they should be able to take because it is two pieces for a rook but black needs to be careful black needs to attack the center right away rather than playing here allowing us to castle and defend everything this is good for white whereas this entire line is good for black because they can place c5 they should just attack the center right away and it's hard though because mentally it's like lipper your king is you kind of want your king to get safe and you want to like you do this mostly because you also want to run your king around to safety but the king is actually fine and white doesn't have a significant way to actually break through and cause enough damage here so such a line should be good for black and you should make a draw a similar if they play here but for whatever reason with this line people just mess it up like it's just a straightforward draw nobody's uh nobody's studying it's because you put it on an engine it just says zero zero zero and you say to yourself well this is like just equal nothing to worry about and then you actually do it in the game and then they have no idea what's happening so here again our big threat was queen to h5 and i guess we can pull the audience the two main moves are here and here and one of them loses immediately like one of them just is really losing and then one is you know should be a draw but even then people mess it up who wants to defend defending is hard though maybe nobody wants to actually defend also what's up joe g6 queen h6 is bad for black keep that in mind because we'll discuss that later bishop takes g5 is better g6 losing immediately so perfect everybody's wrong everybody's wrong good yeah good good everybody's wrong um so castling is is the wrongest of all though so castling you really got to be careful castling is definitely the wrongest but but that's also a very important nuance that it black is really never going to be able to castle in like a ton of these lines so that is part of the the thing but g6 is actually the only move that survives and people are reluctant to do it they really are if you take here we simply take back and now after queen to b6 we play castles and this position is actually remarkable it looks about equal like it looks about fine right it looks about fine ow what's wrong the problem is black can't do any of the normal moves here you can't play c5 if you can't play h6 i mean you can but it doesn't actually make a threat because there's a pin you can't castle and we can demonstrate some of these so you're gonna have to come up with some weird plan but another thing is you can't even go this way and castle over here because then the f pawn hangs uh i mean okay so h6 doesn't even really make a threat you can't castle if you castle rook d3 if you cancel rook d3 and game's over maybe maybe a computer holds for like a little bit but there's three pieces coming over to that guy so castling is like super dangerous you can't cancel and uh what else would what else would you do i mean people might try c5 right i think c5 looks like a good move but it actually fails there's a tactic knight takes d5 knight takes d5 and if here here and now we're on this guy we're on this guy and if you take with your queen we go here so this just fails to a tactic and once you start to notice these threats you notice that if you castle we're bringing in some more people you notice that if you go here there's this tactic that you need to watch out for uh i i don't know what the best move is it's probably here but then i don't know what black does so i don't know if anybody wants to suggest something for black i honestly don't know what the best move is but i know that this is really going to be hard to play i'm going to hit the engine because i actually don't know what the best move is maybe it is c5 but uh c5 runs into this an e6 and maybe that is the best you can do like it's really not easy it's really not easy to play this so uh so anyway don't trade this bishop but that's everybody's inclination it looks like the safest and that's why everybody falls for these traps in this opening but like most people do do that g6 which everybody was scared to play actually is the only way to play this and now after the queen goes to h6 bishop to f8 and if we run away let me hide this if we run away again black needs to be accurate here and most people mess this up too so i'm going to test you guys one more time uh so if you do knight a6 and castles then your f pawn's hanging i thought 96 might be the best move but then you can't castle after that because your f1 is hanging queen e7 h5 queen takes g5 fails uh queen e7 h5 so these will both fail usually whenever this pawn moves so i know h6 is refuted by this so i'm gonna assume h5 is refuted by the same thing uh usually if you get a position like this when you get these three pawns specifically here in this kind of position uh it tends to be really good maybe this h maybe h5 though is an improvement on h6 i know this one line and then we can look at this we can look at this with an engine again but i know there is a line um if h6 you can sack for three pieces but in that line you go here to keep this threat and then it goes how do they they deal with this threat they play here but you can stay here with this threat and now the queen needs to go somewhere and then your next move is like f4 and f5 and even though you know something like this and f4 uh even though it's it's three points for a piece usually you want the pieces here the pawns are strong you can castle you can push the pawns actually get there faster than black can never do anything and get developed properly so they actually do cause it so with h5 uh i don't know the answer to what happens after h5 this is actually maybe an improvement although i assume you can still sack and get at least three pieces and it's probably good for white uh i'll say point ah computer doesn't want to take if you take to take as a mistake here exactly uh have i blundered anything maybe we're still a little bit better but i don't have i don't have the same option of going back to g4 as if this pawn was on h6 uh you still can't do this it's probably good for white or you cannot do it and you can just play queen to d3 queen to d3 might might start some other threats also queen to g3 so anything that looks at this g pawn might start creating some very serious threats so that's kind of interesting um but anyway so i don't think anyone though has said oh there we go paul c dulce has got it uh in this position after queen to h3 you want to go to e7 most people are going to go to g7 which is wrong and again it's one of those situations where it isn't obviously noticeably wrong but if white just castles what again does black do again c5 is met with a knight to b5 and if you castle again this is met with queen takes h7 uh and h6 will again be met with capturing i just want to make sure the sacrifice is sound but yeah again as soon as the h pawn moves you can start to look at sacrificing here and here we have a similar situation but with this guy on g7 rather than on f8 and something like this if you as long as you stay kind of on this diagonal uh i thought g4 was the strongest because you could keep this threat and even if they attack you you run away this kind of stuff usually works out well for white but again yeah so again it's it's here and here and so if you can't do any of these things i don't know what you do i guess you play queen to e7 like i guess you play queen to e7 uh but then probably we can just play f4 with a strong position i would imagine something so f4 just totally prevents what i'm preventing is castling even after h6 so my goal with f4 was to prevent castling via the fact that now if you go here i can play f5 so if you go here uh we can take this you might be able to play like a computer and just play g4 like you don't care about nothing or you could simply play here and get an awesome position so this is very dangerous you can see just how dangerous this is we remind the tape we rewind the tape for anybody just joining us we're looking at the two knights with bishop to e2 and in this main line after d4 knight here this is a very dangerous option it leads to a draw but uh but yeah we didn't show the perpetual line so we ought to show that if you take with a queen again you can take with the knight then after here the way to make a draw is to go here uh and you just keep going like this you play back here where white his best option is probably just to go back and you should make a draw but it's really rare so if you're playing like a higher rated opponent or if you are uh you know if draw is fine because of the tournament situation or whatever or you just think that you're going to trick them you're going to play this line and they're going to mess it up then you can play that line instead let's just rewind the tape one more time here is the main line after they go back we play knight to g5 and they take another interesting option is knight takes e2 and whatever black does i think there's actually a very interesting way of playing against this that no one has ever done before most people and again we always are we're thinking about pawn structures a lot of this class has been just about pawn structures uh whatever they do essentially white's you know the basic plans are black should be playing for c5 getting the knight out queen to b6 just by looking at the pawn structures we know that they got more space over here so that's what they should be doing and obviously we got one of these kind of french style pawn structures so everybody i think everybody in the database if i remember right you know plays for f4 because that's just what you do you play for f4 and f5 and maybe you toss this in but there is actually a small difference this isn't a french because our light squared bishop is gone and usually that's the all-star you know when white gets castled you know you got a bishop here you sack on h7 you greet gift em and you win well maybe we can actually get a dark squared attack and we can do this plan against any one of these moves so no matter what order they put these in we can play instead of f4 h4 so it looks like now there actually are there's eight people that have done this but i wonder if they do what i'm thinking uh knight to f3 c5 so here's all the basic stuff so we didn't play f4 and we're just gonna say we're comfortable with our knight on f3 when they go here we probably will play c3 to defend this knight to c7 and one of the interesting options is in some order rook h3 rook g3 with an idea of also you're going to put your king here if they ever castle oh my gosh they're dead they are dead if they castle and we have a big dark squared attack too we can play bishop e3 queen to d2 we're going to be sacking here we're going to be sacking here something great is going to happen if they castle on the king's side it's going to be over and if the castle on the queen side what typically is going to happen is you know we'll probably play this move here or later and then after all this you know whatever happens we have play on the queen side as well we can play a3b4 trying to open up stuff we can always take here at some moment if we feel like this is secure enough uh and we can try to get a queen side attack but we're going to be better just because of the space so even if black doesn't castle and get checkmated they're probably going to go the other way i wonder what the evaluation actually is it's about equal king f1 uh maybe it's better for white the computer gets really confused by these but it's fine i think white actually is a little bit better due to just because of all the space i would assume the computer would like us and it has this plan rook h3 now it's starting it's starting to put the plan together uh something like if queen to b6 you can play king to f1 get the guy a little safe uh you know but something like this it gets interesting i like that it plays i like that it just keeps going but i don't know it could be interesting you can even play here now you can play h5 and then here you also get play on the king side even if there's no king over here uh just your your rooks you should be able to get some play over here anyway so i think that's one interesting way to play obviously you don't have to and that's not the main line but you could consider taking here with your knight if that's what you're into and there's one more line so let's back it all up for anybody that's just walking in this is a two nights carl khan lecture with bishop to e2 there's one other line that i think actually would be like the serious way to try to get the biggest advantage possible with white it's not necessarily this is actually the the complicated aggressive one so for those walking in with your caveman karos looking for a good time this might be a better try for that so after d4 knight f6 exactly in this position instead of playing e5 like we've been doing this whole time with knight to g5 to follow h3 which scores really well h3 scores really well this is also a very interesting option and you're asking black a question you know are you gonna take here are you gonna run away and taking here is probably wrong we just take back and this actually looks like some of the positions we've already seen where we just know that white is better even if you don't do anything even if your next move is castles this is just going to be better for white for example it looks like people are taking here after this capture looks like they take i can get on board with it uh in a position like this it looks like we can castle something like c3 is probably also interesting knowing that they're going to f3 because we can put the guy back and i can imagine this actually getting dangerous for black for example if they went here and we just play like queen to d3 followed by bishop to g5 we have some ideas of taking the defender of the h pawn and giving checkmate so they'd have to play something like g6 and then maybe h4 uh something like this i don't know could be dangerous right uh maybe we'll castle on the queen side we'll use all of our rooks maybe we'll get some sort of attack if they have to play h5 maybe that gives us some hooks for later um so this could get this could be very dangerous i can imagine something like this really going well for white um if they go back which i think is the way to do it now we can force the knight back there's actually like a ton of lines here like like everything's been played but i think you can just drive them back and then drive at this uh this bishop here does seem to score pretty well bishop g5 seems to score pretty well as well and then you just keep going and so now it sort of resembles some sort of like advanced karo khan and again it's these typical situations where they they need to pick how they want to defend they can play h6 they can play h5 um h6 for example is the slightly less common one we probably can just play h5 and g5 like you can kick this guy back you can play for g5 if they take probably you take with your bishop something like if they go here we could play like this i don't think they're going to take this pawn because we're going to get some activity uh in this position i kind of went off the theoretical walls here but okay computer likes this likes queen d2 it likes taking which i don't know if a lot of humans would actually want to take this pawn and allow our rook into the game but whatever the case is this is the more aggressive it's it's a lot murkier this isn't the simple solution anymore this is like what you should do if you want the aggressive approach um and there's always always always going to be counter play over on this side of the board because there's open files we got this open g file so there's just always going to be some counter play and black isn't like maybe black does eventually get c5 and all this stuff in and you get an interesting exciting game so um okay if they play h5 which looks to be a little bit more popular that's the other choice i think again you should take just make sure that there's something that's open g5 is played slightly more often taking does seem to score very well and if they take back i wonder if the computer actually takes that off the computer computer does take it i was for some reason thinking it might just go back and not even take it because that kind of looks like a thing that happens in the car con but if they do take it knight to g5 seems to be a pretty good move uh where here is a good way to you get again sort of some just murkier more aggressive position so if you like the advanced karo khan and you're looking for something a little bit different you might be really comfortable in these kinds of positions uh we're guaranteed some counter play but it's going to be pretty exciting because eventually blacks can also like black's also coming through breaking through if that's what you want you want this position you want to play h3 and you can take it from there so this is a good weapon to have in your belt because if you are playing like a grand master and you want to draw okay there's some lines where you can just maybe just force a perpetual but then if you're playing a low rated player and you want something a little bit more aggressive there's something there for you too so uh hopefully that was a good lecture i think this actually will go up on youtube so this is your last chance to say goodbye and tell everybody that they should subscribe to the youtube channel follow me on twitch and all the good stuff last chance hurry sneak it in video's about to end hurry all right

Channel: Jonathan Schrantz

Views: 59,478

Keywords: chess, chess openings, chess openings explained, caro kann, two knights, chess openings for white, chess traps, chess tricks, jonathan schrantz, vampirechicken, zolpi

Id: 3gocSY9dEKk

Length: 33min 52sec (2032 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020