Partner Requests in Bughouse
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 about chess. Because hasty and premature attacks are often rewarded with checkmate, bughouse can help to nurture impatience and impulsiveness. But if bughouse is played with a little patience, there's no reason it should be detrimental to a player's chess development. Whether or not bughouse helps a player's chess is another question. Some titled players have told me that bughouse has helped their chess, giving them novel ideas, helping them see certain tactical motifs, and helping them survive while their King is under attack. Others say that bughouse is its own game, and that it hasn't influenced how they play chess at all.
There are uncountably many chess variants, and some are very unlike chess. They may have an object which is totally different from chess, they may have different pieces, different boards, or different laws. Some have elements of chance. Some variants combine these differences. Bughouse is quite close to chess, although precisely how close will depend on the player--the stronger a bughouse player is in standard chess, the more they can use their chess skills in bughouse. Bughouse is even closer to chess than it is to crazyhouse. (Crazyhouse does not have as much room to use standard chess skill. A player can never bust out their endgame skills, because pieces immediately come back.)
Many principles of chess are also good principles in bughouse. Control the center, develop your pieces, etc.
If you were to try to arrange the well-known chess variants along a spectrum, and see which ones are the closest to standard chess, where would you put bughouse? This will influence how you play bughouse. Obviously, bughouse has two boards, and (usually) four players. Pieces can be dropped as moves. Time emerges as a fundamental feature, since time directs the flow of pieces.
Let's look at a typical premature attack. This is the sort of thing that makes chess coaches suspicious of bughouse--and rightly so.
Obviously, this is not a sound way of playing. Imagine the impossible--that this is a very strong attack and that Black is very hard pressed. There are some chess variants which are for purely tactical reasons just too much in White's favor and Black is struggling (atomic chess, three check) or even objectively lost (anti-chess) from the very beginning. Now if bughouse were one of these games, it might still be playable, because there are two boards, and both players playing Black would have the same problem. However, the game might deteriorate into a race to play the same rather unimaginative attacking line. This would be video-game-ified team crazyhouse. It would not rely on or nurture the kinds of thought processes which are typically associated with chess. If bughouse were like this, a lot of interestingness would be lost, and there'd be little reason to recommend it to students of chess.
Fortunately, Nf3-Ng5 is weak, premature, and fairly easy to deal with.
Bughouse is more than a video game. This explains why practice and study go such a long way towards increasing a player's skill. While being up time does confer an advantage, all other things being equal, being down some time is not game losing. If you are downtime, but posing difficult problems to your opponent, they will nearly always either make a major mistake, or be forced to invest the time back in order to stay in the game. Many players, having grabbed material and exposed their King, leading to a position which might be defensible, often crack. They ask their partner to wait, so that they can use the time advantage, and convert a dodgy position into a nice one. They hesitate, losing the time advantage, then they misstep, and get mated. It's possible to riskily expose one's King for material gains and survive, but it's good to know how hard this is in practice.
If you are below 2100 in bughouse, I think slowing down is worth it. Once you really understand the positions you get, you can speed up later. You will learn more by thinking than by playing quickly, and you will avoid terrible positions where you are forced to spend large amounts of time just to find any move that doesn't lose. If you play strong moves, your partner will not be forced to sit in order to hold material which hurts you. For instance, if you are mated by a pawn, this can completely paralyze your partner. Either it will be impossible for them to move, or they will be forced to ruin their position. Practice slowly and thoughtfully, and the speed will come easily. Certain levels of speed just make partners impossible to co-ordinate with. Stuff is bad, then it's good, then it's bad again.
Some games end up in disagreement. Let's not describe it euphemistically--many games end up in bitter arguments about whose strategy caused defeat. It's pointlessly moralistic to assign blame, but it is worth thinking about who could have done what differently in order to win future games. Some players want you to play faster, some want you to trade more, others want you to trade less. Whatever bughouse players ask from their partners, they should also ask themselves, "how reasonable is that request?" Many requests are made unreflectively. Some players ask for a piece when they already have all of the pieces of that kind. Some ask for oddly specific trades which are impossible. You have to decide if your partner's suggestions (or demands) were reasonable, or not.
Imagine you are playing White. Your partner is asking you for a Knight.
What should you ask your partner for? Ideally, you could just ask your partner to send whatever it is they want to send. Let them do their thing. Some players are always wondering why the flow is not higher, and some are always wondering why it is not lower. Some wonder why their partners are not faster, or more coordinated, as if speed and coordination were easy to come by. (Co-ordination just means your attention is divided, and it's best to co-ordinate when it's easy, when the payoff is big, or when it's totally necessary.) Perhaps everyone else needs to change, or perhaps they would win more if they changed their expectations.
Generally, my feeling is that because Black often has a tough time in any opening, their requests should be taken seriously. Sometimes, Black can't avoid high trades. White's job should be to make those trades good but not necessary.
Take this well-known variation of the French.
Black sacrifices another piece. With high trades, it's well worth it. With ordinary flow, Knights and pawns, Black is struggling. Of course, it's easier to help as the partner if you know this sort of thing is coming. Playing with a partner you know should guide your play.
Broadly, there are three styles of bughouse. There's aggression, there's defense, and there's centrism. The aggressive player sacrifices material, maybe not only when it's obviously good to do so, but when it's plausibly good to do so, or when it's maybe possible to make it good, but it's unnecessarily difficult. The defensive player exposes their own King not only a little, for huge material gains, but the exposure may be great, and the material gains small. A centrist is a different sort of player. The centrist prefers to have little to do with premature attacking or with risky defense. Premature attacking is replaced by timely attacking, and it need not be on their own board. The thing about "attacks" like Nf3-Ng5-Nxf7 is that it not only spends pieces and neglects development, it also fixes the board the attack is on. Risky defense is replaced with prophylaxis--preventive measures. The King only moves when it absolutely must.
How should you decide whether to play aggressively, defensively, or in a centrist style? On balance, it's better to a be a centrist for a few reasons. First, it's a much better research program. You can always ask how you could have played better, and how you could have helped your partner better. The hyper-aggressive players are always lamenting the low flow, and the hyper-defensive players are always lamenting the fact that a pawn was traded at the wrong time.
If you are forced to defend, you want a small window of opportunity for your opponent to attack you. And if you are going to attack, you want to attack with whatever flow your partner wants to send. If this is your research program, you can always find improving moves. If you are hyper-aggressive or hyper-risky, it's the partner who has to do all the work. Feeding Knight, Queen, etc., while avoiding tactical mistakes, is nearly always much harder than seeing that you can plop a Queen on the board and deliver mate. Holding flow is often much harder than playing a patient move which nullifies an attack.
If a team is made of two centrists, they are usually able to avoid the most tedious part of bughouse. Pawn mates somebody, and the time is even. If the pawn is not coming, that team is busted. Now both sides wait until the clocks get so low and then everybody premoves a series of senseless moves trying to win on time. Some might say that it's a part of the game, and that one had better be able to focus. I just don't think chess should be about reflexes.
How easy or hard is it to play in a balanced way? Sometimes one patient move, or one cautious move, can prevent trouble before it even occurs. I once asked a partner to throw away a Bishop to get safe. He said "no." It was something like this. An early sac-sit. (My partner was White.)
My partner said "the Bishop is too valuable. If my opponent drops a pawn on c6, I am trading a Bishop for a pawn, without making any weakness in Black's position." (Obviously Black would not push c7-c6 because then pawn or Knight at c7 would be too good for White.) Fair enough. My response was that a Bishop on the board was worth less than a dropped pawn, and this plus easy King safety it was a no-brainer--just give the Bishop and make space around the King. My suggestion was disregarded. We lost the game. Although it did get me thinking about the value of pieces on the board vs the value of dropped pieces--which seems to be something bughouse players have not gotten around to assigning precise values to.
Of course, balanced players annoy overly defensive and overly aggressive players. But a team of balances players can win games against all comers, including against two players who are both individually stronger. Bughouse players over-emphasize individual ratings. If I see someone simulling in bughouse (forbidden by chess.com by the way--unfortunately because it has so much instructive value) and one account is very high rated, but the other is very low, I just see what the average is.
Another question to ask is, what happens if both boards are aggressive, or defensive, or balanced? Tactical considerations are always the most important, and it's possible that two aggressive or two defensive players can win due to the many threats they pose, or due to the excess of material. But in my experience, it's easier to play with a weaker centrist/balanced player than it is to cater to even very strong players who are stylistically rigid.
If everything here seems too abstract, that's because I've written posts on how to play the London, or the French, and the Sicilian. Sorsi has on his blog a post on e4/e5. And there are also various posts about co-ordination, tactics, and so on.
If you start playing bughouse, think about what you are doing. Reflect on the requests partners make of one another. If you study bughouse like you would study standard chess, you'll see that bughouse is a deeper and better game. There's no real money in it, but there was also a time when there was no money in standard chess.
