Knight constrained in advance Caro-Kann Recently, I've been playing the Caro-Kann exclusively against 1. e4, with good results. The one line that I find somewhat confusing is the advance Caro - specifically, where does the kingside knight go?

[FEN "rnbqkbnr/pp2pppp/2p5/3pP3/3P4/8/PPP2PPP/RNBQKBNR b KQkq - 0 3"]


After 3. e5 Bf5, the bishop gets developed outside the pawn chain, which seems good for black. Something that consistently gets me in trouble is that it seems like my g8 knight has no good squares to go to.

If the knight is developed to h6, it gets captured by the bishop, and after the pawn recaptures, black is left with doubled pawns and the option to castle kingside is more or less not available after this point (the g-file is now open).

The knight obviously cannot go to f6, as it would simply be captured by the advanced pawn.

The only reasonable possibility seems to be moving the pawn to e6, then moving the knight to Ne7, but where is the knight going from here?
Where the knights go depends on your pawn structure.

One option is to do the following, at some point


e7-e6
Nb8-d7
Ng8-e7
c6-c5
Ne7-c6


You get a French defence pawn structure with corresponding ideas.

You could go for the same pawn structure with a different knight setup.


e7-e6
c6-c5
Nb8-c6
Ng8-e7
Ne7-f5


Putting pressure on the d4 square.