My Best Games #2: Opening the Closed Sicilian

Today's game features the Closed Sicilian and shows how to punish black for not castling early. This is a game that I already posted in the SPL forums but without annotations. I will continue to post games that I have already posted in the SPL forums that were not already annotated but will be now, when I get to the games that were annotated in the forums I will still post them here, but will focus on other games as they were already analyzed.

I am playing white in this game. It was played a few months ago (like a lot of games that you'll see in this blog series), when I was still playing the Closed Sicilian. My history with the Sicilian is interesting. When I first joined the club (in-person club, not chess.com club) that I'm in now, the coach taught me how to play his favorite, the Grand Prix attack (1. e4 c5 2. Nc3 and f4 against almost all black replies, like d6, e6, or Nc6). It was fun to play and worked for a while as I climbed the rating ladder, but as a played better and better players and looked in books, I found that black could quite easily gain equality or a slight advantage with a kingside fianchetto and expanding on the queenside early and attacking there. Then I started playing the Closed Sicilian with 3. g3, and looked forward to it every game since it was so easy and fun to play, with a natural attack. Pushing the f, g, and h pawns was very fun. But it turned out that against the Closed Sicilian too, the same setup for black worked well as in the Grand Prix. So I finally switched to the Open Sicilian. Probably the my unconscious reason for playing the Grand Prix and the Closed were to avoid theory... Now I play the Open almost exclusively, but will sometimes play a few games with the Closed for fun. I highly encourage that you try it sometime, as it will probably catch your opponent off guard and is fun to play.

Here we go!

Thanks for reading this, I will see you next time with a perfect Sicilian Dragon attack!

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