
How do you take breaks? Try singles Bughouse - waratuman
http://42floors.com/blog/posts/how-do-you-take-breaks-try-singles-bughouse-youre-going-to-love-it
======
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.

~~~
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.

~~~
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.

------
phillco
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.

~~~
Dn_Ab
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.

~~~
civilian
I LOVE alpha centauri, but yeah, I don't see how this would be a good
"15-minute-break" game.

~~~
Dn_Ab
hah yes, you're both right, although I've played it enough that certain states
of the CPU of my old computer started to get worn out. So I can now stop after
a small number of 1 more turns. But no, I don't play on 15 minute breaks - I
did not read the article so was not aware it was about short breaks. I only
play when I have 2 or 3 hours min to spare.

------
pflats
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?

~~~
thejteam
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.

And trash talking anybody who dared castle.

~~~
xenophanes
FYI castling is standard in lots of bughouse openings and good in general,
early f-pawn sacs are bad. This is at higher levels of play though. If you
don't know what you're doing then you're better off with a move like Qe2 or
Qe7 than castling.

Early sacrifices are bad because they put both you and your partner down
material. Against top players, they will not let you have the pieces you need
to win, and they will defend all squares, and if you spend any time waiting
for pieces you'll get down on time and definitely never get what you want at
the right time. Bughouse requires very fast, very solid play at the top
levels.

But defending in bughouse is hard, and piece flow control is hard (requires
watching partner's board while still moving super fast), so the newer the
players the more that just sacrificing stuff can work.

------
Jun8
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...

------
umjames
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.

------
sethbannon
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>

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>

------
georgemcfly
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.

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cfinger
"Better than ping-pong"

Careful now, that's a pretty strong statement.

------
PhrosTT
I think the benefit to mindless breaks is your subconscious works on problems
for you in the background.

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
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.

------
Void_
Here's something that easily woke me up after a day of coding:

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
It can be fun single player too. There's no concept on "winning" then, but
it's still challenging to find sets.

------
zacharycohn
So as someone who has played A LOT of bughouse in his day... Bughouse is
awesome. Never thought of playing Singles.

------
Alex3917
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.

~~~
aperture
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!

------
binarymax
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.

------
villagefool
Did I miss something? on 2:04 the player on the right takes a piece that has
been removed and returns it to the end of the board. Is that legit?

------
askedrelic
Our office has been on a big Banagrams kick, I get pretty similar mind
recharging benefits.

------
jrockway
Why not regular chess?

~~~
Tangurena
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.

~~~
jrockway
But the people who are good at Bughouse here have all said you have to move in
0.5 seconds or it's not even worth playing. I can play chess quickly, but not
that quickly.

~~~
chromic
Play with a time increment per move. I play casually at work with 2 minutes on
the clock and 5 seconds per move.

------
josscrowcroft
I've never heard of BugHouse until just now, but I love it.

------
jsmcgd
I don't play chess but what does Jason do at the 2:02 mark?

~~~
datr
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).

~~~
jsmcgd
Thanks, that explains it.

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grandschema
sounds like a fun game.

recently i have been using a desktop widget from stretchclock.com to remind me
to get up every hour and stretch.

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eli_gottlieb
What is this "breaks" you speak of?

