English Opening vs the Dutch Defense! Who Wins?!?| Game #6

This game was the second round of the G/50 Open at the Marshall Chess Club, held on Saturday, August 10th, 2024. I went for my English opening and my opponent, Aileen Zhou, countered with the Dutch.

I have faced this opening a lot recently and decided that I didn’t want to fully commit to a pawn to d4 push. Instead, we saw a very closed pawn structure where neither player seemed ready to trade off material. In the end, I got into time trouble and started making a series of blunders in what should have been a drawn endgame.

There are a lot of takeaways from this loss, but the biggest is to commit to a plan! I never pushed d4 in the center, which is fine, but I took far too long to attack on the queenside. Instead of moving my queen a million times, I should have thrown my a and b flank pawns immediately and attacked the queenside. It is by no means a guaranteed win, but it is better to have a plan than no plan at all!