I just got home from a less-than-formal bughouse tournament at the local chess club. Bughouse is a very unusual variation of chess in which four players are split into two "teams" and one member from each team plays a member of the other team on a board. Pieces cycle through the boards and can be placed (almost) anywhere on the board in lieu of a normal move.
Strategy in bughouse is extremely different from that in normal chess, and though the games are played with the same pieces, chess and bughouse are totally different things. I feel that playing bughouse and other variants too often will corrupt my skill in real chess by subconsciously using tactics from the wrong game to internally generate possible moves.
Perhaps it would be better for everyone's chess skills if different-colored or -sized boards were used for playing bughouse. I suspect there could be some at-least-semi-valid psychological support for such a thing. That way, mental associations would treat the games more differently.
No comments:
Post a Comment