Closed Sicilian gone wrong (1570)

 In this game though my lack of experience with the English seemed to have lost it for me with the doubled pawns remaining a weakness to the end.

PS: Hahah I wasn't paying too much attention to the game when calling it the closed sicilian, it's the English, an opening I know even less.

I don't know too much about the English, but I'll still try to help in a general sense the best I can. A few points:

> White doesn't usually play for an early d4 in the English - because the opening of the position tends to favour black sufficiently for at least equality. To play for an advantage, white usually follows up c4 with g3 and Bg2, to clamp down on the d4 square and play for a space advantage on the queenside. This isn't the only strategy but it's the most usual.

> Following on from that, I think g3 makes more sense then e4 on move 6. After all, the black queen isn't doing much on a5, and white has a lead in development. But even after e4, where the doubled pawns arise, I don't think you position is anywhere near as bad as you imagine! You have the bishop pair in return for the pawn weaknesses, i.e. dynamic chances against static defects. You played the first move correctly, Ba3 and he replied c5, which was a blunder and you could have punished with Nb5! as suggested by PrawnEatsPrawn, and suddenly it's black's pawns that look silly!

> Even had it not been for this tactical shot, I'd sat that after c5 black's pawn structure is at least as bad as whites, probably a lot worse, due to the hopeless backward d6 pawn and gaping hole on d5. Interestingly, white has no equivalent hole on d4, due to... his doubled pawn on c3! Who said doubled pawns are always bad? So in this structure, white can just pile in on d6 and black will have problems.

> When you played Bd3, this makes little sense to me for the reason explained above, the bishop should be on g2 controlling the diagonal. You say the bishop is defending the pawns - in reality what it is doing is being blocked in by the pawns, and feeling stupid :-). And to top it all off, it's blocking a rook on d1 from attacking the d6 pawn. So this definitely isn't the right place for the light-squared bishop.

> Even after this, I think you were worse but not losing. White's best chance of a draw was to keep the knight on d2 where it is defending the weak c4 pawn, rather than move it back to f3, playing for e5. The problem with the e5 break is that it swaps off all the pieces that possibly could have defended that pawn! After this I think c4 is inevitably going to fall, because the a3 bishop is on the wrong colour square to defend it. White needed to sit tight and try to make black find a way to break through, rather than make it easy for him.

Disclaimer - This was written by an expert standard player who doesn't know much about the English, off the top of his head. It's a complex opening and if you want to learn to play it well, you probably need to learn from someone who is stronger than me (master standard) and knows the system better. But I hope I've been some help.

22 Rd1 appears to win a piece.  If 22... Kd6 you can just play 23 Re3.

Thanks everyone for responding, especially madhacker, and yes yeres30, that is why I got these confused.  For me, that was the only incentive to play the English, as a backwards sicilian, but there are some important concepts there to grasp at as far as the differences go, plus it can too easily transpose into QGD lines, and I'm not quite comfortable with those.

And Mad, I really wasn't too sure how to continue if not for the break.  It seemed that if I didn't keep pushing or moving forwards, I would never actually gain anything and it would turn into a stale game.

I also have no clue when I should be fienchettoing and when I shouldn't be.  Are there any good rules of thumb?

I don't really think you can boil chess down to "rules of thumb". If you could it'd be an easy game. Rather, you've got to play enough of these kinds of positions and get a 'feel' for them, and the ideas inherent in them.

What made me say Bg2 looking at the diagram you presented was 1) the alternative of d3 doesn't make much sense, as it will be blocked in by c4 and e4, as happened in the game (classic bad bishop) and 2) white has already got a good grip on d5 so it makes sense to hone in on it, and give black's d-pawn problems.

You've got to play the position as it is in front of you, not some abstracted representation/simplification of it ("doubled c-pawn position", "isolani position", etc). Chess is played on the chess board, not in some book. This has always been my approach.

Well said.  As a beginner it is pretty easy to assume knowledge I just don't have, but maybe it's just common sense I'm lacking.  Are those positions worth knowing then?  Because you see quite often, people at my level just knowing the few opening moves and then figuring out the rest by logic.  It isn't a flawless way of playing the game, but it seems that a lot of openings are less determined by the book, and more by the whim of both players.  And THAT is seen up to grandmaster level.  For instance, moving the queen at 5... Qh5 probably is in no line of the english, but it still was a manageable position.  OR should these lines be memorized to avoid basic mistakes?  I'm never sure.

There's certainly no harm in learning the main lines of your favourite openings by heart, but on its own that isn't enough. I do some coaching of teenagers and I've seen many who insist that they "know" such and such opening perfectly because they can bang out the first 15 moves of the main line without thinking. The problem is, when they get to move 15 and run of out book theory, they have no idea what is going on in the resulting position, and by move 20 have probably got a lost position.

In reality it's more important to understand the typical strategic objectives of an opening, and then rely on your own calculations and intuition to achieve them. This is even more true in something like the closed English, which is quite a 'slow' opening (with no really sharp forcing lines. I'd suggest as a starting point, if you want to play this opening, to search Chessbase for a list of grandmaster games in which it is played, play through the games, and try to work out what the players are doing. This should give you a better 'feel' for the system and help you play it better.

I dont think you had to resign (especially if it was live), you could have played for the draw. You could have gotten at least a pawn after he takes your rook, so material wise it would have been okay.

I totally agree Madhacker, though I certainly see the appeal of using positional rules of thumbs as crutches to avoid analyzing deeply.

In chess as in anything else, abstractions are useful as a method of analysis, only if you understand that they are abstractions and represent a simplified approximation of reality, not reality as it is.

Once you start relying on abstractions rather than thinking for yourself, you're almost certain to make bad errors.