18 Queens: Fun with Crazyhouse
About a week ago, I decided to give Crazyhouse a try. I found an opponent, leanValdes, who was willing to play five or six 5|0 games, and we both got to win some of them.
After the sixth game, I had an idea. "Do you want to try to make 18 queens?" I asked. (Actually I said 20, but I had miscalculated...) He agreed, so the challenge was on!
First, I told him to capture my pawns. This way, he could add them back in and promote them to queens after I moved my pieces out of the way. Then I reminded him to be careful not to checkmate me while I got my king boxed into the corner by 3 knights. I got the idea of capturing his pawns and then resurrecting them where he could recapture them, so he wouldn't have to move all his pawns all the way accross the board. He got some queens, and then had to move them out of the way so he could place more pawns on the board. Meanwhile, I just moved my rook back and forth.
After he had his 18 queens, we both had about 2 minutes left on our clocks. "Now checkmate me," he said. We decided that it should be a smothered mate, so he boxed in his king. With my time running low, I realized that my knight was pinned. He unpinned it, but I had less than 10 seconds left, while he had a minute. We spent that time figuring out how to make it work. He added a bishop to protect my knight from his queens, and I checkmated him with 5 seconds on both of our clocks. It was fun!
