The Five Principles of Bughouse

 The five elements of bughouse:

1. King safety

2. Material

3.Strategy

4.Tactics 

5. Time

I would say that at the lower levels, everyone seems as if they are trying to disprove one of these principles.  At the higher levels, there is a lot of excellence in all of these.  Some players would include coordination.  I think that in general, my style requires less coordination.  I have decided to take a random game and show how these principles decide the result:

Looking at the result, it looks like my partop (white on the right board) violated the principle of king safety:


The problem occurs much earlier.  The partop should defend, but instead makes a meaningless trade.  He plays exf.  There followed @e2 followed by Nxe2 leaving f3 open for Black:


So this occurred: 

Partop has tried to get some play with R@b8+, but to no avail.  It is only one check.  While knights can be used to defend g2, there is nothing for partop to take control of h3:

White throws a check with N@d6.  This violates the principle of material.  It helps me (white on the left board) and only gains one second which is in no way important:

Here on the right board, Black plays Bxd6.  It turns out that Black has a mate.

I didn't see the  forced mate for Black on the right board, but there is one.  Note that if white plays Kg4 and Black plays Nf6+, white can then play exf6, so that is not the answer:

After exf5, the white king can move neither forward nor backward unless Black makes a mistake:

with g6+, Black makes a mistake:


On the left board, black will give up a rook.  He doesn't really have to, but he is in time trouble:


 So then on the right board, Black plays R@g8+ and @g7#.  It all goes back to where he traded pawns instead of defending!





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