Featured Game

Ha, you missed it - in the blink of an eye, my Contest Puzzle page has morphed into a Featured Game page. There's still a double board puzzle for you to think about, but I've decided to eliminate the Star Solver Podium, as most buggers didn't seem to be interested in getting their names on the podium. (Frankly, this genuinely surprised me - I thought you bughouse players were a lot more egotistical than that.) The new wrinkle here is that all the double board puzzles will be taken from actual games, and I'll be providing a downloadable version of each game, complete with annotations, in .bpgn format.

If you don't have the BPGN viewer on your machine, let's fix that right now -- download the file from the downloads area of bughouse.net or bughouse.org. (At least one of these links should work, I hope.) The downloadable file is about 450K in zipped format. It's a great little tool for viewing bughouse games and it's free. In addition, there is a good collection of master games at bughouse.org - download these games (also free) and you'll have a great tool for self study. Hey, if this database can turn me, with my 1400 strength board sight, into an 1800 to 2000 strength player, there's no telling how far you can go with it.

Featured Game #1:

A Donnybrook!

This game was played March 13, 1999 on the FICS server. It's a particularly wild game, even by bughouse standards, with a bizarre finish that I won't give away -- it'd be extremely rude of me to give away the surprise ending.

A position from the game is diagrammed below. See if you can find a way for PureBugger and Anky to win it. (Yes, PureBugger would need a really fast mouse if JKiller makes the moves to stall the mate as long as possible.)

Here's the annotated game - click on the link and save it to the directory where you have your BPGN viewer. Then play through it and be amused and amazed.

JKiller 00:53	Thufir 00:18*
PureBugger 00:04*	Anky 00:08
* indicates player to move next