Bughouse on Lichess

It's not as simple as "bughouse will never happen." Thibault has expressed that it is technically possible, but it will take a huge amount of time and effort from him, so why would he add this technical burden to the site when he's sure only a 100 or at best 1000's of players will be playing bughouse? Seeing this, I decided to start a bughouse team on Lichess (lichess.org/team/lichess-bughouse) so that we could gather a lot of players to prove that bughouse is, in fact, worth the effort to implement. Unfortunately, the team did not gain as much traction as I would've hoped, and we've been stuck in limbo for a few years. Last year, during a tough period of my life, I decided that it was time to fight for the bughouse cause once again. Since then, I have hosted over 6 OTB bughouse events in Lebanon and one international event in Istanbul, and am planning on hosting many more (two more OTB events this weekend!). Anyone interested can check out our work / progress on Instagram: www.instagram.com/thebughousehub/.

I really think that the only way forward is to have the wider bughouse community be all in one place and convene on promoting the game. I hope that can happen soon!

As for the toxicity of the game, that is to be expected in any team game. Of course, though, with bughouse it's much more pronounced because there seems to be a few incredibly toxic players who just drive away newcomers and create some sort of positive feedback loop of toxicity among themselves. I think that in general as a team game, bughouse will always have the "shifting the blame on your partner" problem, but it won't be as pronounced when it's introduced to a wider audience.

Bughouse is far more complex than shogi... a bughouse website (not Lichess) would entail:
* moderation
* server costs, maintenance, security
* software maintenance for browser compatibility, security, etc.
* lots of other software maintenance for unforeseen circumstances

... as well as writing the code and getting it correct. I recommend players try shogi at lishogi.org although we're struggling finding a player base too.

@spidersneedlovetoo
Actually I was not trying to look for silver lining, be holistic or exercise positive thinking about chesscom bughouse :)

I genuinely find the topic interesting and welcome any discussion that might spark ideas how what we see on chesscom can be minimized, because I am actually working on a lichess-based bughouse implementation and feel it is a problem that could at least partially approached by better design decisions about UI and available features.

@Toadofsky
Yeah moderation is a good point

@FischyVishy
My experience with bughouse has been only on chesscom. I am/was zh "addict" playing on lichess mostly, but was not interested in BH, for a variety of reasons. Only after playing in the first BWC with a dedicated partner and with voice when I started to actually appreciate the game, but soon after the BWC was over I would switch back to playing ZH only, just because I am not always in the right mood to handle being called "idiot" every couple of minutes. It took me 2 more BWC across the span of 2 more years to actually develop thick enough skin to now play BH on a daily basis. So in a way attracting more people also depends on minimizing toxicity in addition to maybe having more people reducing toxicity.

And in more philosophical sense, I try to avoid thinking in "essentialist" terms, about "toxicity" being an essential attribute of certain people, but not in others. For sure there really is a small and vocal minority of people like that, and for sure what you say about having more "non-toxic" people would dilute their influence in poisoning/forming the whole culture, but I feel there is potential to be toxic in everyone and am wondering what could be done better in practical terms to reduce that and make it easier for a newcomer to switch their mindset from the competitive, all-against-all, individualistic mindset, formed by playing chess to a team mindset where not everyone is an enemy, but also not all you build in a game as a "good" position is purely your own contribution, but is also result of a lot of random luck and partner's decisions as well, that suddenly when it gets ruined, because of bad coordination/timing/luck, you instinctively blame partner for ruining what you have "worked so hard to achieve". I see this pattern of thinking a lot including in myself sometimes, with varying and often questionable objective justification.

@blunderman1 I hear you about the silver lining, I just needed to frame things in a positive or people get me trippin' ...for example, and partially for your amusement, I've been doing a little "research" on these matters playing bughouse today and had my teammate accuse me of cheating by letting my time run out (even though I still had 50%+ of my time and was in a complicated position....). Not sure when it started, was calculating when they distracted me with this chat, basically self-defeating us:

(i'm bulldozemcgee)

www.chess.com/game/live/73515096633

NEW GAME
*******(1365) and FM ***** (2582) vs. bulldozemcgee (1341) and ******** (1461) (3 min)
win +15 / draw +7 / lose -1
********: reported
bulldozemcgee: who is?
********: bulldose
bulldozemcgee: why?
********: he is losing this game on purpose
that is a form of cheating
so I reported him to chess.com
this game is over
bulldozemcgee: who's sand bagging?
********: cheating is against chess.com rules
bulldozemcgee: whose cheating?
********: and he lost this game on purpose bulldozemcgee is cheating
bulldozemcgee: you talkinga bout zyxon?
wtf?
********: when you lose a game on purpose ... that is a form of cheating
GAME OVER
Your partner lost on time. (3 min Rated)
Your new Doubles (Bughouse) rating is 1340 (-1).
Was ***** a good sport?
bulldozemcgee: how was i losing the game on purpose?
********: you sat for no reason
bulldozemcgee: wut? i was thinkin?
********: you let your clock run without moving
for no reason
bulldozemcgee: you started chatting about cheating and i got distracted
********: in a 3 min clock ... you cannot sit
bulldozemcgee: i was thinking move calculations
********: unless you are losing on purpose
please stop playing bughouse
bulldozemcgee: that's abilism too,
stop being paranoid
********: you lost on purpose
bulldozemcgee: making excuse to not play a t 2500
********: that is a form of cheating
you lost on purpose
that is a form of cheating
bulldozemcgee: wild. you literally self-defeated us with your paranoia

***
**
*
As you can see I was literally clueless as to the nature of the accusation. They're accusing me of cheating-by-letting-time-run-out to sandbag my rating and I'm just trying to calculate the right move. Whatever, thanks for the venting but it does offer us some interesting insight with respect to this conversation..

@Toadofsky This got me wondering if there's a way to save people-hours on moderation through community self-moderation— through up and down voting of people's opponents/partners.

This is a pretty clear-cut example of how it could fail. I get downvoted when my partner sees me lost in calculations and thinks sandbagging but conversely if they're just a paranoid personality and always over-accusing it could create backlash from community votes get them shadowbanned.

(Sort of like the way chess dot com has "is ***** a good sport" but actually have it weighted to mean something...

Sorry, I'm mixing site-design and post-game venting, never a helpful combo but at this point it illustrates both the complexities of building something new and the utter theoretical necessity of the task itself.

@FischyVishy
The above is a good example of the way players drive away newbies. In this same gaming session, I got asked to "never play" from my partner after we WON because he didn't understand why i asked for two pawns in a row (here for reference: www.chess.com/game/live/73511985771 ..wanted them, for light-square exploits crazyhouse style. It was leading to a pretty strong position with possible mating options if I hadn't later mouseslipped a bishop with 22.B@f6 )

(no need to study the games to get my points, I'm just ranting in these regards ;p )

Conclusion: These are good examples of the kind of toxicity I was talking about. No surprises here. However, I'm still willing to say that this isn't about the game itself but about the people playing it. Maybe I'm even willing to double down and say bughouse is a game that, with the proper formatting, can even reduce toxicity and emotional violence in our society. Lofty goals here, spider, but what do we got to lose?

(question to moderators: is it still public shaming if i'm talking about players on another website?!)

@Toadofsky said in #4:
> That all said... someday I may be enough of an idiot to try making such a site, but I'm working on Shogi etc. first (and shogi is just as fun).
nah! especially not lishogi. terrible moderators over there. just trash!

@ALucasM said in #15:
> nah! especially not lishogi. terrible moderators over there. just trash!
I don't understand. The place is growing but seems quiet to me (except tournaments are decently attended).

@Toadofsky said in #16:
> I don't understand. The place is growing but seems quiet to me (except tournaments are decently attended).
it wasn't quiet while i was over there. i left, and now things ARE quiet. i bet you of all people know why i left.

@ALucasM said in #17:
> it wasn't quiet while i was over there. i left, and now things ARE quiet. i bet you of all people know why i left.
I promise I'm not being sarcastic or difficult or anything like that... I just write code. I honestly don't know and I'm sorry.

@Toadofsky said in #18:
> I promise I'm not being sarcastic or difficult or anything like that... I just write code. I honestly don't know and I'm sorry.
so it wasn't u who did it.....

@ALucasM said in #19:
> so it wasn't u who did it.....

Thank you for the good examples of the challenges site designers face from players. If you want to be taken seriously treat people like you wanted to be treated.