I arrived at this position last night in a G/30 quad. I was black, and playing the white pieces is a 2146 player. He deviated from theory and now black has the preferable position. White has just played 16.g4 to prevent black's obvious f5 break.

The question now is, what do you do? I thought for quite a while here (probably 10 mins, which you can't really afford to do in a G/30) and couldn't come up with an effective plan or target to attack. It feels like there should be a good way to get at white's king, but it's safer than it looks. Enough rambling from me. What would y'all do here?

Here's the diagram, black to move.

Disclaimer: I'm a patzer.

I think your advantage here is mostly illusory. White's position has weaknesses but you have a slight space disadvantage and a very ineffective light squared bishop, plus a couple weaknesses of your own. White's king is nowhere near as loose as it looks

The only plan I can come up with is something like Kh8, f6, Bf7 to get the bishop somewhat in the game, potentially followed by g6, Kg7 and h5, trying to open the h-file. This seems awfully slow and clunky though.

Quick thought if you have any advantage here then to prove it you will need to blow up the centre asap before white can coordinate his rooks.

So how about aiming for some combination of ...Rac8, ...Nf6 and ...Bd4 or ...Bb4 to threaten ...Bxc3 and ...cxd5 and force White to recap at some point with his e pawn. Then your Bg6 will transform into a great piece and meanwhile if white tries to develop his Rook on hi with Kg2, he has to worry about stuff like ...Rc2.

I think you have serious time management issues if you are wasting a third of your entire time of the game in this position.
That being said I would probably try Rad1 planning Nf6 putting pressure on the d pawn.

Qd8 looks like a useful multipurpose move.

My only concern with 1...h5 was 1...h5 2. h3 hxg5 3. hxg5 gives the open h-file for white to attack. But of course, there's no need to play 2...hxg5, so this is actually fine for black I guess. Also good to note that black controls the g1 square with the bishop and queen .

Tex, would you mind telling us what you played before disappearing for 2 weeks?

Sure. Here's the full game and PGN.

I played 16...Bd4 with an idea almost exactly what tagWAG said. What I completely missed, and didn't expect, is white's 21.f4. Objectively Houdini evaluates the position as roughly -1.0 in black's favor, but we both had about 7-8 minutes on our clocks at this point, so it's a great practical choice.

What really makes it a great move, which neither of us could have known at the time, is that black has to walk a pretty fine line to stay better. Houdini's line goes 21...hxg4 22.Qxg4 Qb4 23.Ba2 Bh7 24.f5 Bxc3 25.bxc3 Qxe4+ when black trades queens and white's attack is stopped. This line isn't impossible to find, but with the clock ticking I couldn't do it.

All in all it was a strange game. Black had the better game out of the opening, control of the dark squares, and white couldn't castle. But white's king was much safer than it looked on g2 and opening up the center proved difficult.

Thanks all for the input. As usual it was very helpful.

http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game...r.php?id=71388

Edit: I don't know how the thumbs down icon got on my post. Must have accidentally hit it.

The old "improve the position of your worst-placed piece" rule should lead you to the right answer pretty quickly in this spot (your queen is on the wrong side of the board).

That's always helped me in these "what now" positions.

why would you play h5 to just trade on g4? that kind of goes against the bigger plan of prying open the f file. it's pretty obvious that white is not going to take unless something pretty drastic changes with his development and king safety.

i think the bigger question is that if h5 h3 is going to be played, what's the follow up there? or in the original position, if we find a good plan, can that plan be improved by playing h5. right now, two pawns holding f5 aren't the only problem, the Bc4 is also on the problem diagonal, so putting pressure on that piece should probably be a priority. Rac8 looks like a pretty good start.

fritz hates f4... it's just giving hg Qxg4 Qb4 basically winning a pawn and leaving white's king wide open on the kingside with no defense

As someone else said, the plan would be ...Qd8 to get the queen to the kingside. However, 1...Qd8 2. h4 is annoying, so play 1...h5 2. h3 Qd8 instead as then 3. h4 is not as good for white.

I think h5 h3 improves Black's position by taking away any h4 ideas from White.

The idea of Qd8 was to free b6 for the Knight to start pressuring the centre and maybe swing the Queen to the K-side at some point (though at the moment it doesn't do much there). The computer actually prefers Qb4 with Bd4 and Nb6 ideas, creating pressure on the Queenside.