Dealing with an early K side pawn attack

In the following game I thought I was developing well, "by the book", but was caught out by an early K side pawn advance, together with open files for B, Q & R.

http://live.chess.com/live?v=2014032101#

Any thoughts on general ways of dealing with this unusual attack?

I think I did OK in the opening... two pawns ahead by move 15... A bishop exchange plus my Q moving in to defend would have halted the attack... I think (!)

P.S. Somebody just told me I should be posting games to the forum, not linking them, but I don't see a "get PGN" button anywhere on the page referenced by the above link.

P.P.S. This databse game is interesting, the highly rated black player just let the pawns advance and lost to the non-rated player:

http://www.365chess.com/view_game.php?g=1290019

Note that, like me, he gained a couple of pawns but the B, R & Q on open files just destroyed him.

You need to go to your game archves and get the link from that page for us to see the game.

Here's the link from the game archive:

http://www.chess.com/livechess/game?id=758476651

I now also see the "Get PGN" button... but that just downloads it to my desktop. Why doesn't it copy it into the clipboard so I can then paste it into the forum game board? I'm using a Chrome book, which has no app for viewing PGN files.

Here's your game.  I don't know what to tell you about the pgn reader though; i'm not tech savvy.

How did you get the game into the forum? Did you click on PGN button to download the file, open it in Notebook on your PC, and then copy and paste it into the forum board? Or is there a trick I'm missing for doing all this purely in chess.com or "the cloud".

Hi BackTo1200OrBust--the big move to look at is 11...gxh5?.  Up to that point you're doing fine; white's h3 isn't out of place, stopping a ...Bg4 pin against an f3 knight in openings like the Pirc, but a3 on the other side is fairly useless.  5...d6 is more thematic than ...d5 if you're going for a King's Indian type of setup, but your move is hardly an error.  Still okay by move eight, when you could've taken d4 with either your bishop or your queen.  White was in the giving mood with another free pawn and that takes us to move 11 after h5.

The problem is that your opponent's whole opening is just one trick: getting his rook/queen onto the h-file to mate you on h7.  Taking the pawn leaves h7 weak, isolated, and far away from everything else.  If you don't capture, how does his queen get to h5?  It's a lot more difficult and that buys you time for other defensive moves.  Like ...Bg4, tying down his kingside, or ...Qd5 when your queen dominates the entire board.  From there you bring a rook to d8, your knight comes into the center by way of Nc6-e5 or Nc6-d4, and white is completely boxed in.  You brought your bishop to f5, which was the best way to compensate for your weakened h-file, but 15...Be6?? lost control of that huge h7 square and that was it.  Even before that you could've been shuffling your kingside around, bringing the f8 rook to h8 to help with some defense.  So don't help your opponent with his plans, especially when it's a garbage opening that hinges on only one plan to begin with.  Think about weak squares and whether they're vulnerable; when you fianchetto your kingside bishop, you always have to watch for tactics on h6 or h7.  Also keep in mind development--just getting your major pieces to the center in the opening would've very likely stopped white in his tracks.

I was thinking of doing the usual d6, but thought d5 was better because of lack of central development from white. Yeah 15 be6 was definitely ?? 

My main problem was not even considering the threat from the Q! I relaxed about defence after removing the pawn - what could that R and lonely pawn do?

I spotted that Be3 would give me a bishop for the R, with the dark coloured squares covered by the ther B. I thought this was such a sweet move that I forgot to check other threats he might have. But we all know sweet stuff is bad for you :)

Back to move 11 - I was also worried about him moving the pawn to h7. I guess I could have just moved the bishop out and then removed the g pawn. But then what about the h pawn? It's obviously very dangerous, I'd be tempted to muster all forces (B, Q, N) to remove it, but would that leave me bogged down in defence when I should be attacking? Then again, I'm two pawns up, so why not defend?

You can ses the mass of comnfusion I was in about this pawn advance! It's "just the one trick" but it sure worked on me...

Thanks for all the advice Pentium, it was very useful. Next time I'll keep that pawn structure intact, even with pawns on h7 and f7 (gulp!), concentrate on defence, and wait for his pawns to act. 

I used the notebook.

Chrome OS has a Notebook application but it can't read files with a .pgn extension. But I found that if I simply changed the .pgn extension to .txt then that did the trick! I guess Google are being very wary of "strange" extensions for security reasons. 

Hi -- I just saw this thread.  I deal with that kind of pawn attack by moving my pawns to h5 and g6 as soon as my opponent moves his pawn to h4 and I think that kind of attack might be coming.  I don't let him get any closer with his pawns unless he wants to attack my 3 pawn "wall".  I don't know if that's the best answer, but it seems to work for me.  Hope it helps.