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.
It's not all about winning at all costs. Its just a warm up exercise that gets the blood pumping.
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."
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.
Also, they're normally very goal-oriented, making you motivated to "do" things after playing.
And trash talking anybody who dared castle.
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.
That said, the openings played in the video are not traditional Bughouse openings.
The most standard opens in bughouse are e4/e5 and d4/d5 now.
In the past, standard was e4/d4 vs e6 setups with black either playing d6, d5, or bringing our 2 knights and a bishop next. This turned out to be overly defensive by black as far as pawn structure, while Bc4-f7 sacrifice vs 1...e5 isn't actually very good (but seems good when players are newer).
Note that in e6/nf6/nc6/bb4 openings, or 1...nf6, or various others, it's pretty common for black to play aggressively and sacrifice material (especially if white is over extending). White isn't necessarily the aggressor and has no easy to to quickly punish e6 openings. White normally would get a good position with center control then apply pressure and try to win more slowly.
Something rather common was for most of the pieces to end up on one board, so my guess is that these strange openings are intended to block off places you'd normally use to drop in a piece that your team-mate captured. So it becomes more like Go,
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.
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
Careful now, that's a pretty strong statement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
recently i have been using a desktop widget from stretchclock.com to remind me to get up every hour and stretch.
