[xenophanes]

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.

[Isofarro]

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.

[xenophanes]

You don't understand.

If they ever stop to think about how to play well, they will soon discover they can win by playing worse moves faster.

Just a little basic strategy with the clocks will trump a lot of play skill on the board.

The only way it can stay the way it is now is if they never think about it much. Which is dumb.

Imagine candyland or monopoly was played with clocks and whoever moves faster won. That would be a terrible game for new players. And if they don't understand that the clocks matter, it's in a very precarious position: the moment one of them reads any strategy guide or thinks about it, their game will change itself against their wishes.

They are playing with a ruleset that makes something the most important part of the game, then ignoring it in their actual play. The ruleset doesn't do what they want. It's the wrong ruleset for them.

It's much easier to win on the clocks than learn chess. They are all easily smart enough to do it. It isn't very complicated and doesn't take long to learn.

I don't think if they knew how completely broken there game was they would be advocating it to the internet. The internet has people who know how to play bughouse, the internet will destroy their ignorance which is the only thing keeping their game working.

None of this has anything to do with being super-competitive. It's just the easy, lazy way to win: by focussing more on the part of the game that's easier but also more important.

This problem is fixable. They could set up clocks so if you don't make a move within 30 seconds on a board, you lose. After moving you reset to 30 seconds. With that system they will have some time pressure to keep the game moving, and there also won't be a simple easy strategy that completely dominates them.

You don't have to be super competitive to think about how to win and what is an effective way to play. You just have to be thoughtful. They are clearly thinking about chess strategy (even if they are chess beginners. chess is hard. shrug). I'm just pointing out they could divert a little of that thought to something else, be way more effective, and also dramatically change the style of the game. You don't have to be super competitive to put the thinking-in-service-of-winning which you're doing anyway to a more efficient area.

And if you want a game that you can post on your blog and suggest other people use, it needs to have robust rules!

They are setting up themselves -- and anyone who listens -- for conflict. Some people will play slowly, lose, and be annoyed. Some others will start to play faster and win all the time. One guy will say, "Don't be so competitive", the other will say, "What do you want me to do? I don't spend more time on this than you, I don't practice, I'm still just as bad as you at chess in general. Should I intentionally sandbag and not try to win? That would ruin it for me."

[Isofarro]

At that point, the winning-uber-alles guy doesn't get invited to play. Because he's over-competitive and missing the point of the exercise: stimulating the mind with an interesting and novel problem under a constraint of slight time pressure. Not win at all costs.

The game doesn't have to stand up to scrutiny of strong chess players or expert bughouse players. Those people don't play chess as a means of putting them in the frame of mind for solving dayjob problems.

You are defending a position that really doesn't need to be defended. I'm pretty sure that geeks using this as a ten minute brain exercise aren't going to think they are the next Kasparov.

[xenophanes]

"You aren't allowed to play" because you use a good strategy is a terrible system.

Blame the ruleset, not the smart players who learn the basic way the game works.

Bughouse does stand up to scrutiny of strong chess players, it's just the way to win is different than what they think the game is about.

You're still completely misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with being Kasparov. The point is that simple strategy changes, using the chess skill they already have no more, would make then far more effective at bughouse, because the bughouse rules do not work they way they are imagining.

None of this is "win at all costs" or anything. It's just a simple fact: a 15 second time advantage in bughouse is as good as a substantial amount of pieces. A one minute advantage is almost always game over. Their play is disregarding how the game works -- it's strategically poor in simple ways that they could learn to do better in a 15 minute lesson -- and you are wrong to blame people who use a part of the game (the clock) for applying basic strategy that any of them could learn in 15 minutes.

Games that rely on following special unwritten rules, such as objectively bad time management (vaguely defined for how badly you're required to play), are broken.

[Steko]

You missed the point 3 times. This isn't really about bughouse and everything you've said is about bughouse minutiae. This is about recommending a task that will quickly refresh someone during a break. I think it sounds like a great idea.

At the risk of inviting another irrelevant wall of text, I'll say that your advice while mostly on target is not all accurate. Plenty of people play 5 min bughouse. Not everyone is a high level player or interested in becoming one. For new players taking 2-5 seconds to come up with a move is often superior.

[xenophanes]

The task he recommended as a quick break just happens to be one of the hardest games around, and a game that is despite appearances, all about going really really fast. Not what he wanted. Oops... And then he recommended a version that is well over twice as hard.

All good players play 2min bughouse, go on FICS and type "best B" and look through the game history. Or just look at the games in progress, it's all 2min. More is stupid. If you look at the current game history of the highest rated active player, one of the 2min games involves a 1:48 wait on like move 6. If that was a 5min game, it would have been a 4:48 wait on move 6. So 5min is simply stupid and zero good players play 5min.

You're doing a weird mix of pretending this isn't about the details of bughouse and then getting the details of bughouse completely wrong.

Similarly you claim that taking 2-5s per move is superior for new players. This is 100% false. You will get a worse record if you do that. Stop arguing about the right strategy for newer players in a game you're clueless about. Even if you go back to 1995 or something it was still 3min games, never 5.

[Daniel_Newby]

> Games that rely on following special unwritten rules, such as objectively bad time management (vaguely defined for how badly you're required to play), are broken.

You are the exact opposite of Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comics.

[nhangen]

I read through your entire chain of comments and can't fathom why you've gone to such great lengths to tell other people how to spend their break time. If it works, and they like it, what's the problem?

[xenophanes]

Some people like to analyze games and game rules/systems and see how they work. That's reason enough. You can use reason and logic to figure things out about them. It's the same sort of activity which is popular on HN.

Also they already tried to change the rules by raising the time control to make it slower but you don't think it's interesting that that actually doesn't work in the presence of a tiny bit of strategy? With all other chess variants it does work.

I'm amazed that you came away thinking I care about those particular people. If someone posted about a security hole on a website, and explained it in great length and explained why it does matter because the moment someone competent comes along it will be exploited ... you would not think that was a personal discussion to do with the particular people who made the insecure website.

[dbecker]

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.

[ThePawnBreak]

I think it's because when one of them figures out he can win almost every game by simply moving very fast, the game won't be enjoyable any more. And that is bound to happen sooner or later.

[xenophanes]

I'm not imposing anything on anyone. Rulesets have a logic of their own.

[camperman]

I find it amusing that because of your self-imposed slavery to The Rules, you could never have come up with the game of bughouse in the first place. Two boards? Chess is played with one! That's the rules! Dropping pieces on the board? That's a terrible idea! Once a piece is captured, it's captured! Four players? What heresy! Chess is the purest form of mind to mind combat!

Besides, this article has very little to do with bughouse per se and everything to do with relaxing the mind in between work sprints. Seymour Cray used to do it by digging tunnels. I doubt that his tunnels conformed to the Rules of Tunnels but he did get quite a bit of work done in his lifetime, which is the point here.

[dfan]

His self-imposed slavery is to logic, not to The Rules.