Play Bughouse Game Online on this new website made especially for bughouse.
You need to have two boards. You need to have 4 people total. This is a 2 person vs 2 person team game. You setup the boards so that one person is white, the partner is black. Then any piece you take, you give to your partner. Any piece you receive from your partner, you can place anywhere on the board as long as there is an empty square. Pawns can be placed anywhere except for the back rank and the first rank.
There are 3 different styles according to catask (current World Bughouse Champion, partnered with Jeffrey Xiong
Fast Defense means you play fast and defend. This style is a defensive style to help your team get up on time. You also sit occassionally if your diagonal-opponent is waiting for pieces to attack your partner.
Fast Attack means you sometimes play dubious attacking moves, relying on speed to stay up time, and that your opponent cannot defend successfully in time.
Slow Attack means you play slow, you use the extra time to focus on playing good moves, winning pieces and threatening mates, while also waiting for pieces from your partner.
A good idea is to switch between fast defense and slow attack. When you're up enough time or you're in an attack, you should sit for two reasons: 1) pieces from your partner to attack, and 2) to find the best move.
I encourage you to read catask's article on the various bughouse strategy. It's seriously good.
Stay tuned, this is a feature we will build. Bughouse Chess Engines can be useful to help analyze your game, find the tactics you missed (to win material or mate). It's a very useful idea. However, chess.com is nowhere close to building this feature. FICS has never had this feature. Lichess has the feature for normal chess and variants, but they will not build bughouse anytime in the future.
As bughouse enthusiasts, we're going to build this feature so that you can get better at bughouse chess by finding the mistakes in your game and for practicing against the machine.
Stay tuned, this is yet another feature we will implement. Nobody else on the internet allows you to play bughouse chess against computers. Unfortunately it is not possible to play bughouse chess against computers on chess.com or even FICS. FICS did not allow computer accounts. Chess.com also does not really prioritize bughouse. Instead they prioritize chess. And lichess does not have any plans to implement bughouse since it would be very disruptive to how their server is designed.
There are not many good bughouse chess openings. As white, you want to play e4 or d4. As black, you counter with e5, d5, or turtle up with the french e6/d5, or hedgehog e6/d6. The easiest way to learn bughouse openings is to study the best players' games and study the moves they play. Look at chess.com best bughouse leaderboard for who to study.
Bughouse Chess is a very recent phenomenon. According to the wikipedia page for Bughouse Chess, this variant was first invented around 1960. Nowadays, it's known as a very popular diversion during chess tournaments due to its social nature, team dynamic, and fast crazy play around tactics.
A bughouse enthusiast. watchandlearnlol (formerly dominictyler) on chess.com, rated 2500+ in bughouse. I'm old enough to have played on FICS way back in the day. And the user interface for FICS was way better than chess.com. Time to make the bughouse game more popular.
This is the TODO list of ideas I have planned for bughousechessonline.com: