I thought I trapped the bishop

I thought I trapped the bishop but instead I allowed checkmate 

AirPhoenix527 vs. centersquares | Analysis - Chess.com

i have a couple of remarks on this game , first of all , after f3 , which is an excellent move by you kickin back the strong black knight , f4 is not good because it allows his knight back and as it happened in the game that allowed that knight to win a rook afterwards , so as i said , it's an opposite side castling , attac wwith pawns and pieces to try to get to his king and checkmate him or if no checkmate occurs , we can try to win material out of our attack onn his king , so instead of f4 , go g4.

another thing , b4 is not good , u should never push pawns that are in front of your king because that makes ur king more vulnerable.

same thing with a4 , don't push pawns in front of ur king , i know u wanted to trap the bishop but the issue with that is 2 things , the bishop is protected by the cpawn and also he has a lot of pieces that can protect the bishop, the second issue is that opening the a file allowws his pieces to try to checkmate .

also , u're down material so what u should try to do is to keep the position as closed as possible , a4 opens the a file , and the pieces that benefit the most from the open files are rooks and queen, he has 2 rooks that can use that file. so never push pawns in front of ur king especially in the middlegame where it constitutes danger on ur king.

for the f4 move, i was out of ideas and i thought it would be beneficial to trade some pawns off the board. also i dont understand the move g4 because it looks like im just losing material after hxg4, and i cant take back or i will lose my queen, also ive been getting a lot of games where we go into a similar position with all of the pawns on the board and i have no clue what to do because my pieces are not as active and they can not become active without a sacrifice so i do need help on that

also i might be getting a discord soon

the idea of g4 is to attack his king , the way to attack the king is done by pushing pawns in attempt to open up files in front of ur opponent king , g4 doesn't lose material because after h*g4 , we take f*g4 and the pawn is protected by our queen , and what we gain from that is an open f file where we can put rooks and try to pressure to win the knight . for the piece activation , what u try to do is try to get ur rooks on open files , try to find good diagonals for the bishops and for the knights , try to find squares close to the enemy's king

also what do i do against games where all of the pawns are still on the board because it is happening a lot and i do not know what to do because of the extremely closed position

with all the pawns on the board , try to control the center using your pawns ,

also in closed positions , u should look for improving ur pieces , for example , trying to find better place for the knights ( a better place for the knight is where the knight controls more squares) , try to open diagonals for the bishops , and try to to open files for the rooks.