41–50 of 62 posts
Why not regular chess?
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.
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.
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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.
I LOVE alpha centauri, but yeah, I don't see how this would be a good "15-minute-break" game.
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At that point, the winning-uber-alles guy doesn't get invited to play. Because he's over-competitive and missing the point of the exercise: stimulating the mind with an interesting and novel problem under a constraint of slight time pressure. Not win at all costs. The game doesn't have to stand up to scrutiny of strong chess players or expert bughouse players. Those people don't play chess as a means of putting them…
"You aren't allowed to play" because you use a good strategy is a terrible system. Blame the ruleset, not the smart players who learn the basic way the game works. Bughouse does stand up to scrutiny of strong chess players, it's just the way to win is different than what they think the game is about. You're still completely misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with being Kasparov. The point is that simple strateg…
At the risk of inviting another irrelevant wall of text, I'll say that your advice while mostly on target is not all accurate. Plenty of people play 5 min bughouse. Not everyone is a high level player or interested in becoming one. For new players taking 2-5 seconds to come up with a move is often superior.
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 advanta…
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.
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"You aren't allowed to play" because you use a good strategy is a terrible system. Blame the ruleset, not the smart players who learn the basic way the game works. Bughouse does stand up to scrutiny of strong chess players, it's just the way to win is different than what they think the game is about. You're still completely misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with being Kasparov. The point is that simple strateg…
You missed the point 3 times. This isn't really about bughouse and everything you've said is about bughouse minutiae. This is about recommending a task that will quickly refresh someone during a break. I think it sounds like a great idea. At the risk of inviting another irrelevant wall of text, I'll say that your advice while mostly on target is not all accurate. Plenty of people play 5 min bughouse. Not everyone is…
All good players play 2min bughouse, go on FICS and type "best B" and look through the game history. Or just look at the games in progress, it's all 2min. More is stupid. If you look at the current game history of the highest rated active player, one of the 2min games involves a 1:48 wait on like move 6. If that was a 5min game, it would have been a 4:48 wait on move 6. So 5min is simply stupid and zero good players play 5min.
You're doing a weird mix of pretending this isn't about the details of bughouse and then getting the details of bughouse completely wrong.
Similarly you claim that taking 2-5s per move is superior for new players. This is 100% false. You will get a worse record if you do that. Stop arguing about the right strategy for newer players in a game you're clueless about. Even if you go back to 1995 or something it was still 3min games, never 5.
Why not regular chess?
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.
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Opening theory in Bughouse is indeed totally distinct from classical chess. It behooves white to be hyper aggressive and black to be hyper defensive or the game typically ends quickly. That said, the openings played in the video are not traditional Bughouse openings.
FYI you're wrong. Standard play in bughouse is neither hyper aggresive for white nor hyper defensive for black. Building piece sacrifices into your white opening is a normally a sign of a new player. 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 defens…
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You missed the point 3 times. This isn't really about bughouse and everything you've said is about bughouse minutiae. This is about recommending a task that will quickly refresh someone during a break. I think it sounds like a great idea. At the risk of inviting another irrelevant wall of text, I'll say that your advice while mostly on target is not all accurate. Plenty of people play 5 min bughouse. Not everyone is…
The task he recommended as a quick break just happens to be one of the hardest games around, and a game that is despite appearances, all about going really really fast . Not what he wanted. Oops... And then he recommended a version that is well over twice as hard. All good players play 2min bughouse, go on FICS and type "best B" and look through the game history. Or just look at the games in progress, it's all 2min.…
"The task he recommended as a quick break just happens to be one of the hardest games around, and a game that is despite appearances, all about going really really fast."
It didn't "just happen to be" anything. The whole point is an exercise that frees up your brain up from whatever else it was doing. The whole point is that it's hard and you are forced to think about it. Your mind can't wander back to what you were working on in bughouse, much less without a partner, because the game demands your attention.
"All good players play 2min bughouse, go on FICS and type "best B" and look through the game history. Or just look at the games in progress, it's all 2min."
This might be relevant if we were talking about good/high level players. We aren't, they are new players and they are playing OTB and most new players playing OTB play 5 minute bughouse. Yes, true statement, full stop.
"Similarly you claim that taking 2-5s per move is superior for new players. This is 100% false. You will get a worse record if you do that."
I would but a new player wouldn't. What's semi-optimal in bughouse is to make a strong move as fast as possible. A strong player can choose a reliably decent move in less then a second. A new player forced to move in 0.5 seconds as you suggest will make terrible moves and probably lose on both boards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The task he recommended as a quick break just happens to be one of the hardest games around, and a game that is despite appearances, all about going really really fast . Not what he wanted. Oops... And then he recommended a version that is well over twice as hard. All good players play 2min bughouse, go on FICS and type "best B" and look through the game history. Or just look at the games in progress, it's all 2min.…
You are abrasive and ignorant but I'll slog through some points... "The task he recommended as a quick break just happens to be one of the hardest games around, and a game that is despite appearances, all about going really really fast." It didn't "just happen to be" anything. The whole point is an exercise that frees up your brain up from whatever else it was doing. The whole point is that it's hard and you are forc…
In the context of competent players, you specifically said that plenty of people play 5min bughouse. This is false and results in lengthy sitting.
I don't think you're getting that the way they are playing wrong is completely different than not being Kasparov. Learning to play like Kasparov would take ~20,000 hours. Learning basic time management would take ~15 minutes and make them easily twice as effective. Total ignorance is a poor defense against this -- and won't last given they want to hold a tournament -- fixing the rules to do what they want is a good way to keep the game roughly how they want.
They tried to fix their problem by changing the time control from 2min to 5-10min. They already made rule changes to try to slow the game down, but those changes were naive and are ineffective against anyone with 15minutes of basic training.