A Very Powerful Chess Game For Learning - Analysis

Recently, I was asked by a user on this site about my future goals in chess, and besides rating goals I said that I would also like to improve in very opened and very closed positions. This game, played by @Ginger_GM was a very interesting closed position game that gave me a lot to apply to my chess.

The game was also on YouTube, so click this link to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l31KTgfvyBw&feature=share

I would like to thank @Ginger_GM for uploading the video and @lovebecause for sharing the video with me.

Now, to begin with, my play in closed positions has sometimes been extremely poor, and this game shown below is one of the games that caused me to feel the need to improve my play in closed position chess. I was very lucky to get the draw:

Back to the initial game. I noticed that in this game, @Ginger_GM played Be6 with an idea to bring the bishop to h5, which I found to be a very interesting way of thinking and a common pattern for high skilled players in closed positions. The overall goal in many closed positions is to improve pieces and then break through, which the game showed a very good example of. Also, there was a lot of prevention of knight outposts in the game as this would be very good for the other side. Preventing knight outposts is not something I do not know of, but from reflecting on my games, I do not think I have done too great a job of preventing knight outposts, and the game played by @Ginger_GM caused me to think more about it. The following game shows a good example of how I could have prevented a knight outpost as well as created some space for me, but I did not consider the variation at the time of the game as I thought I was losing a pawn: 

The concept of preventing knight outposts can be applied in this game as well as getting more space and piece activity. I also sometimes try to close a position even more when it is already very closed sometimes, which I have learned from this video isn't very good and I should try to keep some options open for me instead of trying to limit my opponent's activity so much by closing the position even more that it limits my own activity as well.

In the original game as well, due to the nature of the position, knight moves and plans were very common. This reminded me of a game I played where I constantly tried to put my knights in the best squares as possible: 

A critical difference worth noting though between knight outposts by me tried to achieve versus those in the original game (Ginger_GM game) were that those in the original game were protected by 2 pawns and therefore more stronger than the ones I tried to achieve, and as a result, my maneuvers did not lead to anything concrete and the game was therefore considered a draw. After watching the video I realized that my long term plans were not as great as I thought them to be in the game and I should have gone for something else instead of spending so many moves on bringing the knights to squares that were not as strong as I thought they were. Besides, the outposts were fairly easy to defend my my opponent, which was not good for me.

I also drew from the original game that it is ok to move pieces back and forth sometimes in a closed position as long as the moves serve a purpose. It is also very important to keep potential pawn breaks in mind, which is obviously something I did not do in this game: 

I also did not have a clear and consistent plan throughout the game, which caused me to not know what to do and just close the position even more, hoping that I could sacrifice something to gain a huge attack which never happened. This brings me to the last two things that I will look at which are very important seen in the original game, which is the importance of a long-term plan and that it is not necessary to keep the king behind many pawns in order for it to be safe. I tried the king safety part out in an interesting game where I had a long term plan. Unfortunately, the game was won on time for me so I never got to see how it played out: 

All in all though, it is very nice to watch an entire master game with comments. It really helps to improve a player's chess and to think more deeply about their own games as well. I hope you have enjoyed reading this post! I hope this post causes you to look over some of your games more deeply than you would have if you had not read this and hopefully you learned something from this blog! Thanks for reading!