Exchange Sacrifice to Monster Bishop in Endgame

This was an interesting game I played today where I try out the White side of the Nimzo-Indian for the first time in a long time. Although I left theory pretty early with a dubious move, I found a few interesting moves as well as an admittedly not fully intended exchange sacrifice that lead to a very interesting endgame.

This annotated game came about from a desire to "practice what I preach." I try to analyze my games - wins and losses - to learn from them. However, when life is stressful for example, I tend to get lazy and just run the chess engine. I wanted to work on using a process (that I have written about on my site - http://www.betterchesstraining.com/2014/07/4-Step-Game-Analysis.html) in order to maximize my learning as well as create something - a thoroughly annotated game. 

There are a couple things I am trying to apply in this process: 

First, I want to follow the advice I read in Modern Chess Preparation by Vladimir Tukmakov to limit my use of the chess engines and instead analyze without the use of the engine. So in this game I spent about an hour exploring alternatives and variations without the engine.

Then I looked up my opening in my database and checked my analysis. The result was another hour of analysis as I wanted to try to understand some of the alternatives the chess engine was giving me. The result is the game below. 

One thing I tried to do which I hope you will find both enjoyable and helpful is to try to explain the purpose of a chess engine recommendation in plain words. Sometimes, both masters and amateurs alike will comment that "X move is better" and not really explain why. I tried to do so here both for my readers as well as to reinforce my own understanding.

In any case, I found the process enlightening as well as pleasurable. I hope you will take a few moments to check it out!