Catalan Game

Hi all,

I figured since summer is here, I would try to do more chess blog posts. And so here it is. A while ago, I started playing the Catalan as white for a few reasons. I liked that the Catalan works very similarly against queen's gambit type positions and positions that arise through an 1...Nf6 move order, reducing necesary opening prep, but more importantly, I liked that the games were more positionally oriented by their nature, a style focused more on suffocation rather than direct tactical pressure. Futhermore, the positions simply felt good to play for me intuitively-speaking. There were some catalysts which caused me to take up this opening over other queen's pawn games, however, one of which was the following game:

There is much analysis to be done with this game, but I will let it speak mostly for itself and anyone who has any questions can ask in the comments (some aspects of the game take some time to figure out.) I will say though, that it is quite impressive, beautiful really, how white plays so directly, honing in on the holes in black's position, and using both positional and tactical means to achive a winning game.