Full Game:

The game started out somewhat normally with 1. d4 d5 2. Bf4 Bf5 3. Qd2 e6 4. Nc3 c5 5. dxc5 Bxc5 6. O-O-O Nc6 7. f3 Nf6. While this is not played often, as the opening is slightly inaccurate by both players, this type of position occurs somewhat frequently. However, on move 8, I blundered. White played Nb5. The correct move for white is to castle or play e5. Castling prevents white’s knight from forking the kiing and rook, winning an exchange while e5 blocks the bishop’s line of sight to the c7 square. Both would be sufficient to prevent white from white’s knight from causing havoc. I, instead, played a6 on move 8, allowing the knight to jump into the c7 square and winning the exchange.

The game cotinued with white being up a rook. For the next couple of moves, white launched its kingside pawns up the board with successive moves of g4 and h4, and 2 moves later on move 14, g5. This is a blunder for white. The moves below show that hxg5 is a brutal move for white. Black can simply play Nh7 attacking the bishop and the bishop runs out of squares to move to very quickly. Run through the moves and take notice to the importance of the bishop on the c1-h6 diagonal.

I have included another variation, but it is equally bad for white.

However, I did not see hxg5 and played e5, attacking the bishop. Many of the same ideas are present in the e5 as in hxg5. Both attack the bishop and try to move it from it post on f4 so that black could skewer the queen the king. White tried to evade the attacks, but on move 18, jumped into a losing move. Look from the position below to move 18. Rd8.

These move won me a piece and improved my bishop pair so that the bishops are more powerful than the rooks on the board. In fact, both of white rooks are still on the 1st rank being very passive.

From there, the game went smoothly into my control and led me to win the game quickly despite only having a +1-material advantage. I will show you some of the more important attacking moments and their explanations. Scroll through the game from here and look at the calculated ideas around the attack through the use to the annotations.

The checkmate was a neat pattern, and I played the most accurate move from 31 to move 35 in which checkmate was forced with correct play. I have provided the ending moves to show the beauty of the checkmate. Move from the position below to the ending.

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Key Takeaways:

Close the center of the board before attacking. It may give attacking chances to your opponent.

Don’t leave your king and queen on the same line, it leaves you open to game-losing tactics.