Let's distinguish tactics or forcing moves, and positional play or non-forcing moves. Chess and all of the chess-like games have these. Because there is another board, there are teams, and time moves into the foreground, bughouse has a third...
The meaning of development seems clear. Get the pieces out into good positions. What moves are entailed by this? And which moves are unadvisable? Let's look at some basic structures. Don't worry too much about move orders and tactics yet...
In Go, every move is a drop, and the stones don't move. They stay in place unless they are captured and removed. This is the basic reason why some Go concepts are useful in bughouse, where pieces are dropped. I'll explain the rules, explain ...
Here are a few tips for anyone playing in the challengers section of the 2024 bughouse world championship happening right now. 1) Handle Long Bishop Moves with Care How could Bg5 be bad? That dark squared bishop is the only minor pi...
What's the best way to get better at games like chess? The usual answers seem too obvious. Practice, solve problems, complete courses. But someone who really wants to improve has already tried these things. Does the answer consist of finding the r...
Strength in bughouse is not fixed. It doesn't make much sense to say that one player's strength is 2005, and another's is 1768. Someone may be better with certain partners, with certain kinds of piece flow, and this can cause big swings in a playe...
There's a good website for bughouse puzzles. All of these puzzles include both of the boards. Some of the puzzles are local puzzles--mating on your board. Some involve sacrificing for a piece for your partner. Others involve asking your partn...
Some chess coaches have reservations about bughouse. Doesn't it harm a player's standard chess? Why would it? The new rules create new patterns, but this in itself shouldn't matter. Bughouse is harmful to chess only if it erodes what someone knows...
It's universally accepted in standard chess that piece development is important, and that neglecting it leads to indefensible or hard to defend positions. The chaotic nature of bughouse means that it is less obviously true that there is a need to ...
In bughouse, relative mastery is rather straightforward to achieve. Whereas in standard chess, years of dedication may pay off very little, many bughouse players achieve a rating of 2300 and higher in less than a year. This is because bughouse is ...
Theory Bughouse is far too chaotic for theory to play the role that it does in standard chess. In standard chess, theory may proceed for thirty or more moves. This is possible because there are no external factors, such as a possible Knight and ...
Part of a comment from a now closed account which expresses the thoughts and feelings that many Chess players seem to have about engines. I don't use computers before a game, only after. And so many times I analyze a game where I thou...
Since my previous posts on variants, why they work, and why they don't, I've been hearing from some inventors and designers of variants. A variant has been implemented based on my an idea of mine. Here I develop and sometimes revise the ideas in o...
You should not only be ready for your bughouse opponents to sacrifice on you--you should want them to. It might seem scary at first, but eventually you can learn to swat aside any early attack. Instead of being a sac sitter, you will do bette...
It can be very difficult to develop a good idea. How do you build on something memorable, yet simple, in such a way that doesn't let it spiral out of control? Musicians, poets, novelists, and of course film directors all experience these diff...
What's the most fun you've had with a chess variant? Perhaps like me, it's playing bughouse, which is not only innately fascinating, but a good way to make friends and interact with people who are not solely interested in taking all of your elo...
The buttons in bughouse allow players to make requests without typing. There are buttons such as "trades are good", "trades are bad", "sit", "go" and requests for each of the pieces. FICS has some good buttons, and some questionable ones, includin...
The Sicilian Defense in Chess is a double-edged fighting weapon. Whenever a strong Grandmaster is in a must-win situation as Black, they will often respond to 1.e4 with 1...c5. This move controls the d4 square, without being vulnerabl...
Often in the random pool, I'm playing as a 2400 with three 1800 players, and I have noticed a few recurring patterns; opportunities that are often missed. There is no real structure to the things that 1800s tend to miss, so I just give these as th...
You've probably got that one player, always rated 100 or so points higher than you, who you seem to do well against. If not, then you've definitely got players for whom you are that "good customer"; players with significantly lower ratings who are...
Chess is a game of complete information. You can look at the board and know what's going on. Sometimes you might need to know if one side has moved their King or not, to know if it is legal to castle. But in that case, you could just look at the s...
When parents ask chess coaches why their children should study chess, the coach will often give an answer which might well be true of other games. Chess brings out discipline, patience, a fighting spirit, and other worthwhile traits, in anyon...
Every bughouse player has different reasons for being drawn to the game. Some like the collaborative aspects, some like the increased depth, and some like the fancy checkmates. I'm sure if you try bughouse, you will be hooked like I was. This is a...
