Pawn breaks serve the purpose of opening lines for your pieces. Once lines are open, ideally you can infiltrate into the opponent's half of the board. Especially when you can get beside or behind the enemy pawns your pieces will be attacking a lot of weak points.
Anyway, the main idea here is observing which area of the board your pieces would be ready to infiltrate. In the diagram, almost all your pieces are on the queenside, and the only one that isn't (the bishop) is pointed towards the queenside. So a queenside pawn break would be a natural thing to play for.
If the pawns stayed the same, but your pieces were arranged a little differently, you may not play any pawn break, and try to instead infiltrate using the open c file. In the position though, both knights block the c file, so that plan would likely take too long.
I clearly have the advantage at the moment in this game. I am controlling the center and have better piece development. The engine says my next move should be a4, however, I played e5 as I figured starting to open up the lines is good since I am ahead. Black ended up equalizing the game but lost with poor endgame play. There probably isn't a simple answer to this question but, can anyone give me any insight on determining when to push your central pawns vs holding the strong central position and looking elsewhere for play? Thank you.
