Attacking the Castled King : Basic ideas

In this post , we are going to look at some of the  most basic ideas  of attacking a castled king . Since in 70% of all games , the king is castled on the king side , we include mostly only examples of attacking the king on the king side .

So , before loads of verbal explanations , lets take a look at this position:

This is a castled position.

In the above position , the King is protected by the 3 pawns in front of it , and by a rook and a knight . In practice , there may be more pieces defending the king , and all of them may be important . But , generalisation is that  the best defenders of a king side castle are :the king side Knight , Rook  , and the 3 pawns in front of it.

Weakening the Castled Position

Now , take a look at the first diagram again . We see that there are 3 pawns in front of the king . If the pawns are intact  , the book says that an assault is almost impossible to carry out .  So , what are the methods to weaken the king's position?  

1)Enticing the weakening of the pawn cover : We force / tempt our opponent to move one of the pawns protecting his king. Now , some examples:

now , another game in the same theme : 

So , the king wasn't casled , was it? In fact , it could never! But this game is instructive because of the way white utilised the weak squares to deliver the knockout blows.

2)Exchanging / driving 

off the key defenders: Here , we weaken his position by making the land bare. For Example:

NOTE: The first principle is mostly the more important one!

Now , for some  Tests!

The final puzzle is from one of my own games here on chess.com

For now , bye!