The Bughouse Diaries

  In this position, I played B@b6.  My opponent played dxe.  I will leave it to the reader to guess what happened next!

 Here I am mating, but if we go back a few moves it seemed improbable: Here several things have to happen order for me to win.  The danger is that if I lose the queen or the rook and my partner gets mated.  If my partner's opponent stalls,  he would probably win.  Also if he plays Qd3 and I get the rook instead of the queen, I probably don't mate. This was another mate, with my partner giving me the critical move: In this position I sacced my queen.  Yes it was a real queen.  I thought, probably incorrectly, my partner was lost, and this was a desperation shot.  I sacced the Queen on f7 and played R@g7+ Here I played @g2, which might be too slow.  My opponent played @g6, probably to cut off my protection of the g-pawn, but this fails to defend his king: Here my partner suggested Bh6, which won!

 Let me give you some idea of how this mate on move 21 came about: So I had this position on move 19.  He had played Nf5 and I played @g7: So in this position, on move 13, I played f6.  Black is already in trouble.  He needed to have a pawn at e6 to stop my advance.  Here maybe B@f8 holds out longer, but he is still in trouble. Here with White to move, I played exd and he also played exd.  My thought is that Black should play  d6 instead of d5.  By playing this opening, he is weakening e5 and f5, which helped my attack.

  Let's see how this came about.  My partner was mated in two, but he took the rook which gave me enough material to mate! I think bughouse is in its infancy.  Every player from the best to the worst is trying to prove that a certain method works.  The top players' methods work better, but they each have their own style, more than contemporary top chess players.  Eventually the top players will all play like computers and there will only be vague traces of distinct styles.  The good news is that the weak players will still be trying to discover it for ourselves! A player may win because one of both of his opponents, or their opponent's partner has the same or different misconceptions that they have.

  Black played one of the few moves that allow mate.  In general I think my opponent here is good for his rating, but he probably wasn't aware of this mating pattern.  This was the previous position:

 Now chess.com allows you to analyze by going back on both boards, so I will go back to show this player's fatal error.  First, here is the mate:  My opponent failed to play e6, so I was able to attack with p@e6.  He played N@d6, which is not an effective defense.

  Here the opponent made the mistake of fianchettoing his king's bishop.  Eventually, perhaps at the request of his partner, he captures a knight on c3, leaving the long diagonal unattended.  He places a queen at f6, but I place a pawn at e5 to chase it away. I place a knight on f6 with check.  He could play Qxf6, but he doesn't.  He goes to g7, so I place another knight on h5 with check.  He takes with the g6 pawn and I take with the knight again checking.  He could go to g6 with the king, but he doesn't.  I get another queen and I mate him like so. This is a good easy problem.  White to move and mate in two:

 I got the urge to write about bughouse today.  I was inspired by watching some games by top players at chess.com.   Going forward, I would like to show some of the checkmates that occur in my games.   Last summer I was thinking about writing a book with analysis of games between intermediate players.  These days I don't have time. I've been playing bughouse for a long time, but I don't think anyone is interested in the history lesson.  But I will use this post to say something about my history in bughouse.  The main thing I would like to say is that I'm glad it caught on somewhat. Was one of the first people to write about bughouse, having edited Bughouse Newsletter for a year or two in the early 90s.  I was pretty conscientious about my analysis and would often have it checked by stronger players. I was also one of the first people to have a bughouse rating system, somewhat before Internet Chess Server.  I took over the rating sys...