Violent restraint

In this post, we take a little break from the blockading action that was featured in the three previous posts. It turns out that everyone can do with a little change in scenery, which may be the reason for these style perturbations that we see in our own games every now and then. It is illustrative of the theme that positional advantages naturally lead to attacks (a handwaving argument, but we will take it at its face value).

Anyway, now that the introductory philosophical discourse is behind us, we bring in our game, which was again played last year in the STC tournament (under the 40/10 time control). It starts out with an English system where my opponent obliges by weakening some squares around his king, and with incomplete development (which, by the way, is a nebulous concept it seems because modern openings get away with poor development in favor of optimal development in closed openings)-particularly his queenside.

I aim for a restraint formation to prevent black's development and park on the light squares, following which some tactics emerge in the form of a pawn break and a knight sacrifice. Black's pieces are too slow to prevent collapse, and he gets mated. So the game ends rather violently after starting out with some innocent weak square play.