7 ms·
How do you take breaks? Try singles Bughouse
- georgemcfly 15y agoYou 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.
- zacharycohn 15y agoSo as someone who has played A LOT of bughouse in his day... Bughouse is awesome. Never thought of playing Singles.
- jsmcgd 15y agoI don't play chess but what does Jason do at the 2:02 mark?
- datr 15y agoI'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 15y agoThanks, that explains it.
- snippyhollow 15y agoIt's part of the Bughouse variant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess#Captured_pieces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess#Captured_pieces
- Alex3917 15y agoI 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 15y agogokgs.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!
- Jun8 15y agoMe 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...
- pflats 15y agoI 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?
- sethbannon 15y agoOpening 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.
- xenophanes 15y agoFYI 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 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.
- sethbannon 15y agoWhat sources are you drawing on for your Bughouse theory?
- xenophanes 15y agoThe best players (who are on FICS).
- phillco 15y agoI'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.
- dominik 15y agoI'm not sure they're that relaxing though; e.g. laddering in StarCraft is more of a stress-creator than a stress-reducer. That said, it does require your entire focus.
- phillco 15y agoIf I lose, my logic is: "oh, I can't be good at this? Fine, I'll be good at this! <goes back to work>"
- Dn_Ab 15y agoI 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.
- UnFleshedOne 15y agoIsn't Alpha Centrauri one of those "one more move" games where you stop at 4 am in the morning, if only because you are hungry and thirsty and need to go to a washroom? Not very good productivity-wise...
- civilian 15y agoI LOVE alpha centauri, but yeah, I don't see how this would be a good "15-minute-break" game.
- Dn_Ab 15y ago
- sethbannon 15y agoAt 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 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 http://socialcam.com/v/kBzSWTQk?autostart=true
- binarymax 15y agoBughouse 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.
- Void_ 15y agoHere'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 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 15y agoIt can be fun single player too. There's no concept on "winning" then, but it's still challenging to find sets.
- askedrelic 15y agoOur office has been on a big Banagrams kick, I get pretty similar mind recharging benefits.
- grandschema 15y agosounds 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.
- josscrowcroft 15y agoI've never heard of BugHouse until just now, but I love it.
- xenophanes 15y agoThis 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.
- Isofarro 15y agoThis is not about being super-competitive at bughouse, it's about getting the mind in a working state to quickly go into the zone. Bughouse to the non-serious chess player is random enough to be zany and enjoyable whether you win or lose. It doesn't need to have a super-competitive streak to be useful as a tool for getting the mind up to speed. Spending a few minutes thinking about a concrete problem is sufficient. It's not all about winning at all costs. Its just a warm up exercise that gets the blood pumping.
- cfinger 15y ago"Better than ping-pong" Careful now, that's a pretty strong statement.
- jrockway 15y agoWhy not regular chess?
- Tangurena 15y agoBughouse 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 15y agoBut 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 15y agoPlay with a time increment per move. I play casually at work with 2 minutes on the clock and 5 seconds per move.
- PhrosTT 15y agoI 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.
- villagefool 15y agoDid 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?
- umjames 15y agoI 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.
- CountHackulus 15y agoWow, 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.
- eli_gottlieb 15y agoWhat is this "breaks" you speak of?