This is a bad game unless you are EXTREMELY good at bughouse.
The people in the article are not good. They are newbies. (You can tell because they play 5 minute bughouse and they play slowly. No good players play 5 minute bughouse because it's a waste of time. 2 minute is standard. If you play with more, you literally end up sitting around waiting for time to get low, for minutes, because that is often to the advantage of the team that is losing and is easy to force by either team most of the time.) Also based on their openings, which are utter crap in both bughouse and chess, they don't even know how to play basic chess either.
The reason it's a terrible game is that bughouse is all about SPEED. You must move AS FAST AS POSSIBLE AT ALMOST ALL TIMES or you just plain lose because time leads allow controlling when pieces come to the other board which is extremely powerful.
It's hard enough to make all your moves in .5 seconds on one board. If you're going back and forth between two boards, you have to literally be one of the best few bughouse players in the world -- with over 10,000 games of experience online -- or the quality of play is going to be terrible.
I'm a strong chess player, a strong bughouse player, and have a great deal of experience, but I'm still not very good at playing two bughouse boards at once. It's very very very very hard.
Doing one of the hardest things around -- trying to play lightning fast on two boards at once -- is not a very good idea for a break. To play halfway decent bughouse on just one board, you need an extremely large amount of practice so that you can defend all types of attacks by habit and intuition, because you need to stay safe in under .5 seconds a move at all times.
Bughouse is all about pattern recognition as fast as possible. Chess skill and other stuff is important but secondary. Honestly, newer players can't even move fast enough in person without knocking over pieces.
If you watch the game you'll see them sitting there thinking for several seconds about moves. If you try that against anyone competent, you simply automatically lose. That's how bughouse works.
The solution for them, btw, may be bughouse without clocks: white moves on both boards simultaneously, then black moves on both boards simultaneously, and so on. I think that would be a good game, though a very different one than regular bughouse.
This is not about being super-competitive at bughouse, it's about getting the mind in a working state to quickly go into the zone. Bughouse to the non-serious chess player is random enough to be zany and enjoyable whether you win or lose. It doesn't need to have a super-competitive streak to be useful as a tool for getting the mind up to speed. Spending a few minutes thinking about a concrete problem is sufficient.
It's not all about winning at all costs. Its just a warm up exercise that gets the blood pumping.
I've played a fair amount of bughouse. You are right about the point about bughouse strategy. Stipulated.
These guys are enjoying themselves.
They feel rejuvenated for work after playing it for a few minutes.
Why impose your priorities on them and claim "it's a terrible game" and suggest they need a "solution."
It'd be like Lebron James telling you not to play H-O-R-S-E because it won't help you become competitive with him at basketball. If you like playing H-O-R-S-E, it doesn't matter that it won't help you beat him.
I've noticed something similar. Playing strategy games (like Age of Empires) works great for me during downtime. They require your 100% full attention if you want to win, so they're very effective at wiping away whatever you were working on.
Also, they're normally very goal-oriented, making you motivated to "do" things after playing.
I do something similar with Alpha Centrauri. Especially if you play University or the Cybernetics, the idea of advancing tech to restart civilization on a barren planet, the writing and the speculative technologies motivate me to want to go make something.
I haven't played bughouse in over a decade, so I've got to ask: what's with the openings in this video? Is bughouse strategy so different that there's a whole new opening book, are there some openings I'm completely ignorant of, or am I just overthinking things?
I haven't played in over a decade as well, but when I did play strategies usually consisted of very quick attacks on the f-pawn, usually sacrificing a knight(sometimes a bishop, but you would have to "waste" a move getting a pawn out first) on the square as quick as possible. Very common for the first 3 moves to be a knight sacrifice on f7.
Opening theory in Bughouse is indeed totally distinct from classical chess. It behooves white to be hyper aggressive and black to be hyper defensive or the game typically ends quickly.
That said, the openings played in the video are not traditional Bughouse openings.
There are significantly fewer bughouse openings than there are chess openings. Many chess openings create weaknesses which can be easily exploited in bughouse. It is for instance not recommended to move pawns other than the d- and e-pawns. Bughouse openings are generally geared towards dominating vital squares and fast development. Captured pieces become available after the first few moves and it is important to develop at this stage as there is often not enough time to do so later. Development also helps to defend against early piece drop attacks.
Where I used to play, we mostly played standard chess openings. Bughouse is different enough that one can have expert chess players playing against novices and since it is team-vs-team, the novice doesn't get totally stomped flat.
Something rather common was for most of the pieces to end up on one board, so my guess is that these strange openings are intended to block off places you'd normally use to drop in a piece that your team-mate captured. So it becomes more like Go,
Me and and three other PhD students in sharing an office used to play a few quick rounds of Unreal Tournament before starting the nightly coding sessions, from our own UT server we had set up. Those were the days...
You can also just play on one board, swapping your opponents pieces for pieces of your color when you take them (obviously you need two sets of pieces). This is called crazyhouse.
I haven't played bughouse since college. Spent way too much time during freshman and sophomore years playing chess and bughouse.
Those guys wasted too much time pushing pawns. When you play with/against good players, you learn not to move that f pawn. The way we played, the objective was to attack the king as soon as possible, so if you move that f pawn, I start getting pawns from the other board that I can drop for check that forces the king out to the middle of the board. That eliminates castling, and I can use the pieces on the board and higher-point pieces from the other board to bring about mate quickly.
The thing to worry about most, is getting addicted to bughouse. One more game quickly becomes several more games. You might even start to draw a crowd. Then the day's productivity is shot.
At my startup we prefer Fischer Random (aka Chess 960) blitz, where the opening positions are randomized (with a few limiting rules). Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
Wow, haven't played this since the CS lounge 7 years ago. We used to play all sorts of chess variations just to see how they'd work out. One of the most fun for us was reverse chess. First person with 0 pieces wins, and if you can take a piece you must. Some surprisingly complex strategies in that, at first you think that losing at chess is easy, but then you realize that losing at chess is only easy if the other player wants you to lose.
I guess it helped that the only game we could play was chess, as our tabletop was painted with a chessboard and there were 2 sets of free pieces.
It's for 2+ players, and it's all about how quickly you can find the set in 12 cards on the table. Finding set is not so easy, read about it in the rules.
I tend to play a few games of Go throughout the day for the same reason. A great game of go is like a street fight, it gets you totally amped up for everything else.
Rengo is fun too, it gives you sort of the feeling of being a crazy artistic genius. Extremely inspiring, but it's a pain to get four people to play it.
gokgs.com was a great place to hang out in to play some games, if you can make online friends.
Rengo is also easier to get set up online. ^_^ But it certainly is crazy!
Bughouse is the greatest variant ever, closely followed by Kriegspiel - the other extreme. I would play constantly and had a fairly high bughouse rating (in New York state at least) back in mid 1990's.
Bughouse lets you have experts and novices playing without the novices getting totally stomped. Because you can always move a piece, or place a piece that your team-mate captured, you have a lot more options. This also makes it far more fun for lesser skilled players than regular chess.
I'm not sure which one is Jason but it looks to me like both of them opt to add a captured piece to the board (which is a rule only present in Bughouse and not regular chess).
[+] [-] xenophanes|14 years ago|reply
The people in the article are not good. They are newbies. (You can tell because they play 5 minute bughouse and they play slowly. No good players play 5 minute bughouse because it's a waste of time. 2 minute is standard. If you play with more, you literally end up sitting around waiting for time to get low, for minutes, because that is often to the advantage of the team that is losing and is easy to force by either team most of the time.) Also based on their openings, which are utter crap in both bughouse and chess, they don't even know how to play basic chess either.
The reason it's a terrible game is that bughouse is all about SPEED. You must move AS FAST AS POSSIBLE AT ALMOST ALL TIMES or you just plain lose because time leads allow controlling when pieces come to the other board which is extremely powerful.
It's hard enough to make all your moves in .5 seconds on one board. If you're going back and forth between two boards, you have to literally be one of the best few bughouse players in the world -- with over 10,000 games of experience online -- or the quality of play is going to be terrible.
I'm a strong chess player, a strong bughouse player, and have a great deal of experience, but I'm still not very good at playing two bughouse boards at once. It's very very very very hard.
Doing one of the hardest things around -- trying to play lightning fast on two boards at once -- is not a very good idea for a break. To play halfway decent bughouse on just one board, you need an extremely large amount of practice so that you can defend all types of attacks by habit and intuition, because you need to stay safe in under .5 seconds a move at all times.
Bughouse is all about pattern recognition as fast as possible. Chess skill and other stuff is important but secondary. Honestly, newer players can't even move fast enough in person without knocking over pieces.
If you watch the game you'll see them sitting there thinking for several seconds about moves. If you try that against anyone competent, you simply automatically lose. That's how bughouse works.
The solution for them, btw, may be bughouse without clocks: white moves on both boards simultaneously, then black moves on both boards simultaneously, and so on. I think that would be a good game, though a very different one than regular bughouse.
[+] [-] Isofarro|14 years ago|reply
It's not all about winning at all costs. Its just a warm up exercise that gets the blood pumping.
[+] [-] dbecker|14 years ago|reply
These guys are enjoying themselves. They feel rejuvenated for work after playing it for a few minutes.
Why impose your priorities on them and claim "it's a terrible game" and suggest they need a "solution."
It'd be like Lebron James telling you not to play H-O-R-S-E because it won't help you become competitive with him at basketball. If you like playing H-O-R-S-E, it doesn't matter that it won't help you beat him.
[+] [-] phillco|14 years ago|reply
Also, they're normally very goal-oriented, making you motivated to "do" things after playing.
[+] [-] Dn_Ab|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominik|14 years ago|reply
That said, it does require your entire focus.
[+] [-] pflats|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thejteam|14 years ago|reply
And trash talking anybody who dared castle.
[+] [-] sethbannon|14 years ago|reply
That said, the openings played in the video are not traditional Bughouse openings.
[+] [-] dalore|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess
[+] [-] Tangurena|14 years ago|reply
Something rather common was for most of the pieces to end up on one board, so my guess is that these strange openings are intended to block off places you'd normally use to drop in a piece that your team-mate captured. So it becomes more like Go,
[+] [-] Jun8|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgemcfly|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umjames|14 years ago|reply
Those guys wasted too much time pushing pawns. When you play with/against good players, you learn not to move that f pawn. The way we played, the objective was to attack the king as soon as possible, so if you move that f pawn, I start getting pawns from the other board that I can drop for check that forces the king out to the middle of the board. That eliminates castling, and I can use the pieces on the board and higher-point pieces from the other board to bring about mate quickly.
The thing to worry about most, is getting addicted to bughouse. One more game quickly becomes several more games. You might even start to draw a crowd. Then the day's productivity is shot.
[+] [-] sethbannon|14 years ago|reply
Bullet chess (where each side has only 1 minute on their clocks) is also a great head clearer and adrenalin booster. Video: http://socialcam.com/v/kBzSWTQk?autostart=true
[+] [-] cfinger|14 years ago|reply
Careful now, that's a pretty strong statement.
[+] [-] PhrosTT|14 years ago|reply
Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is walk away from it.
So I don't think this is good in instances where you need to give your brain time to reorganize.
[+] [-] CountHackulus|14 years ago|reply
I guess it helped that the only game we could play was chess, as our tabletop was painted with a chessboard and there were 2 sets of free pieces.
[+] [-] Void_|14 years ago|reply
It's a card game called SET - here are the rules: http://www.setgame.com/set/rules_set.htm
It's for 2+ players, and it's all about how quickly you can find the set in 12 cards on the table. Finding set is not so easy, read about it in the rules.
[+] [-] Brashman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zacharycohn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|14 years ago|reply
Rengo is fun too, it gives you sort of the feeling of being a crazy artistic genius. Extremely inspiring, but it's a pain to get four people to play it.
[+] [-] aperture|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarymax|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] villagefool|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] askedrelic|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tangurena|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josscrowcroft|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsmcgd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snippyhollow|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandschema|14 years ago|reply
recently i have been using a desktop widget from stretchclock.com to remind me to get up every hour and stretch.