2024 Toronto International Bughouse Tournament Recap

Introduction

The 2024 Toronto International Bughouse Tournament was without a doubt the strongest bughouse tournament in history. FICS bughouse legends such as FM Dan Yeager (alias chickencrossroad) and NM Janak Awatramani (alias 12teen/cheesybread), themselves former bughouse world champions, were joined by two-time bughouse world champion, current bughouse world #1, and dominant bughouse superstar GM Awonder Liang. Lightning fast variants juggernaut IM Mark Plotkin (littleplotkin) and reigning multiple-time crazyhouse world champion NM Jalen Wang (blitzbullet), two of the only players — alongside the aforementioned three players — to reach a rating of 3000+ in bughouse, were also participating. Surging talents Vincent Jingwei Baker (vjbaker) and Zachary Yu (Clockkingswitcher/Kingswitcher), two players who have had highs north of 2800, rounded out the super strong field. The tournament also included several up-and-coming talents and many juniors who will hopefully soon become the bughouse legends of the future!

With such a field, the tournament was shaping up to be quite the spectacle, and I believe that on that front, it did deliver and was a highly engaging sporting event. Unfortunately, though, there were a few organizational issues which I will detail in this article; however, considering that this is, to my knowledge at least, the second bughouse tournament in history to be streamed live (the first being another event I organized, the 2022 Istanbul International Bughouse Open), I think the mistakes can be learned from and improved upon. My goal with organizing these events is to promote and popularize the beautiful game of bughouse, and I hope that no matter how slightly, the 2024 Toronto International Bughouse Tournament moved the needle in the right direction.

Stream

The tournament was broadcast by long-time bughouse streamers chuckmoulton and helmsknight, who streamed the tournament live to hundreds of viewers. The stream of the tournament, from helmsknight's channel on Saturday and chuckmoulton's channel on Sunday, was also broadcast in the playing hall, where the players and spectators alike were able to watch the muted stream while the tournament was ongoing.

Fixed-partner tournament:

chuckmoulton: Part 1 Part 2

helmsknight: Video

Random partner tournament:

chuckmoulton: Video

August 24, 2024: The Fixed-Partner Tournament

The fixed-partner tournament included a group stage of twelve teams evenly divided between two groups. Teams were seeded so that the four "strong" teams (as judged by online bughouse ratings) would be divided equally between groups; each group would thus have two strong teams. The top two teams from each group would face off in the knockouts bracket with the first team from group A playing against the second team from group B, so a 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3 knockout. The standings in the group were based on total game points. The number of games in the knockout stage as stated in the initial rules and regulations was changed; each match, including the grand final, would be played according to a first to 10 wins win condition. The matches were initially very tight, with Daniel Yeager and Eilia Zomorrodian greatly outperforming their expected results according to ratings. Eventually, though, Awonder and Janak found their groove and won in powerful fashion.

August 25, 2024: The Random Partner Tournament (Switcheroo)

Personally, I was far more excited about the random partner tournament (what I call "switcheroo") than the fixed-partner tournament because there was a great deal of intrigue on who the individual best bughouse player was. It was important, though, to decrease variance and make the tournament have a lot of rounds so that the "random" in random partner would play less of a role. To that end, eight rounds with twelve players were played. I decided to change the tournament format (as announced in the rules and regulations document) on the day of the tournament because I thought I had a better idea that would make the tournament more conductive to finding the best player. My new format would have four rounds with 12 players, another four rounds with eight players, another four rounds with six players, and finally an all-play-all, six rounds with four players, coming out to a total of 18 rounds, or 72 total games. I quickly realized that four rounds were not enough to determine the best eight players as some players were getting very unlucky pairings, so I added another two rounds. After six rounds, though, some players were not satisfied with their results, so I asked all the players to agree to add another two rounds, which they did agree to. Eight rounds seemed fair, and I thought it would be good to stop there, even if the players were all in agreement to add more rounds, because I wanted to start the second phase of the tournament soon as we had time constraints: we had to finish before 8:30 PM. With that explanation out of the way, here are the results after 12 players played eight rounds. The bottom four players were eliminated:

Janak Awatramani seemed to be in peak shape, and the current world #1 in bughouse, Awonder Liang, only managed to finish in 6th place. Of course, luck plays a huge role in such random partner tournaments, and that is why it was necessary to eliminate lower ranked players as they add a lot of variance to the tournament. On paper, according to online bughouse ratings, all the top 8 finishers, bar rising star Eilia Zomorrodian, whose bughouse high is at 2385 at the time of writing (the other seven players have all had ratings of 2800+), were rather evenly matched. This meant that the second phase of the tournament, which I ad hoc decided would be as many rounds with eight players as we could get done, was going to be a rather good way of proving who was the best player. Awonder Liang finished in clear first, a stunning eight points ahead of second place, FICS bughouse legend FM Daniel Yeager.

Final results:

In group B, the standings remained bunched up for quite a while. After 7 rounds, young Kousuke Nguyen-Kawamura finished in 1st with 19 points, 1 point ahead of Quentin Ma and William Io, who tied for 2nd.

Cool Tactics!

(Analysis board courtesy of bughouse.pro)

Awonder Liang is playing as Black on board B (to the right). His opponent, Janak Awatramani, has just bravely taken a bishop on h5 with his queen. Can you see what friends Awonder needed to mate Janak?

Janak Awatramani did get his revenge against Awonder Liang, though. Can you find the mate Janak found against Awonder? Watch how Janak and his partner, Vincent Jingwei Baker, worked out the mate! Janak is Black on board B and Awonder has just played f3.

Ratings

Glicko 1 rating system

Initial assumptions: Janak, Awonder, Daniel, Mark, and Jalen = 3000 initial rating. Vincent and Zachary: 2800. Nicholas, Eilia, and Utkarsh = 2300. Cindy = 2200. Vinny = 1800. For all others: initial rating of 1500 as recommended by Glicko. Before explaining my reasoning, and to better understand why Daniel Yeager has such an insanely high rating, I want to make one thing clear: ratings are a reflection and measure of skill! If the initial ratings are "overrated" or "underrated", they will self-correct the more tournaments are played. So if you feel really strongly that players' ratings are wrong, host an OTB bughouse event! If you message me and we can agree on certain standards, I'll rate your tournament. Don't complain, do :).

With that out of the way, let me explain the initial ratings for the top group: this is obviously based on their peak online ratings. This was during a period of rating inflation, and nowadays Awonder is ranked #1 with a rating of ~2800. However, I think this assumption is fair because in other tournaments, like the 1st Barcelona International Bughouse Open, Andreu Ferré Moragues and Joan Miquel Erice were given 2500 initial ratings, which were in line with their online peaks. Well, except that wasn't really the case for Andreu Ferré Moragues, who has had a peak of 2700, but that was decreased because he was near a 2500 live rating and I thought it would make more sense to give him the same rating as his partner. In retrospect, Moragues should've been given a 2600 initial rating, but there's no need to nitpick so much! For Vinny Puri, who is a strong chess player with some bughouse experience, an initial rating of 1800 made sense. There were other strong chess players participating as well, but those players did not seem to have much bughouse experience, so an initial rating of 1500 was given to them.

Note also that for some Lebanese players (such as myself), the 2nd Lebanese Bughouse Championship has not yet been rated because of missing results, but it will be as soon as I recover the results.

For those of you wondering why bughouse legend Daniel Yeager has such a high rating, look no further than his star partner: Daniel and his partner, Eilia Zomorrodian (2300), were able to go 9-10 against Mark + Jalen, two players given initial ratings of 3000, and defeated Vincent and Zachary, two players given an initial rating of 2800. It makes sense!

For the random partner tournament, ratings will be out at a much later date because of some technical reasons. Ideally I will have a website with all the ratings up and running in a few months.

Lessons Learned

After every event I run, bughouse or otherwise, I take stock of what happened and try to learn from any mishaps. While overall I was quite satisfied with the way I organized this event and I think most players and spectators alike were left with a positive impression after the tournament, there were some important mistakes and omissions that can be greatly ameliorated. As I have come to realize, broadcasting bughouse is not easy at all. I am keenly aware of how difficult it is to broadcast blitz orthodox chess; even with DGT boards, which, to be quite honest, can be greatly improved upon technologically speaking, prestigious tournaments like the World Rapid and Blitz regularly suffer from broadcasting issues. Fast-paced chess is just inherently difficult to broadcast and the technology for broadcasting it is not being actively invested in (and researched?). Bughouse is doubly (I see what you did there) difficult to broadcast because there are two boards to take care of, it is necessary to view two clocks, and it is played without increment, so it is more fast-paced than blitz orthochess. Barring the invention of some bughouse-specific DGT-like technologies, bughouse will remain a challenge for broadcasters.

That being said, as the chief organizer of the event, I take sole responsibility for any failure, even if some mistakes were not at all my fault. The fixed-partner tournament on Saturday was set to begin at 11 AM, but it ended up being delayed till 1 PM because the broadcast of the event took almost three hours to set up (starting from 10 AM). In retrospect, I should not have underestimated the time needed to set up such a broadcast, especially because the technician needs to communicate with the streamers on camera angles, which might take a lot of adjustments and thus a lot of time. In the future, setting up the broadcasting necessary for the event should be done a day beforehand. If that's not possible or if the venue is not available, at least three hours, and not an hour, should be given to have the setup ready. Another possible, though not always very practical, solution is to have the streamers on site so that they can talk to the technician directly and view varying camera angles in person. I hope that this picture can serve to explain just how difficult it is to set up a bughouse broadcast:

Here are some more aspects that could be bettered:

• DGT clocks are too flimsy. These were tried on the first day because I thought it would be nice to have accurate clocks, but there were various issues with them, the most important one being that they were not updating. I think the camera clock view from the second day (link) is much better.
• Being able to hear the players communicating is very important, so microphones are crucial. I had initially forgot that the cameras do not come with the mics already enabled, so had the streamers not alerted me, a lot of nice and interesting communication between the players would have been lost.
• Live standings should have been available. I was giving live updates in the streamers' chat and encouraging players to talk to the camera with the score, but clearly that's not optimal.
• The pairings should be entirely automated. I was doing the pairings for the random partner tournament by hand, but a very simple computer program, written specifically for random partner bughouse tournaments, could do the job much more efficiently. If anyone wants to open source such a solution, please feel free! Otherwise I will endeavor to work on this myself very soon.
  Thankfully, in tallying up the scores of the players, I did not make any arithmetic errors. Phew!
• Ideally ad hoc solutions should be avoided and the tournament rules and regulations document should cover any possible deviations from the announced tournament format.

Answers to Quiz

The quiz from the first blog post can be found here.

#1: Taken from one of my own games.

An artistic mate (found by chika_kyoko) is 1...B@c3+ 2. B@d2 (2. Qd2 N@d3+ 3. cxd3 N@c2#) Q@f1+ 3. Rxf1 Nxg2+ 4. Kxe2 N@f4+ 5. Bxf4 Nxf4+ 6. Ke3 N@g2+ 7. Ke4 f5#. Quicker, though, is 1...exd1=Q+ 2. Kxd1 N@c3+ 3. Kc1 B@d2+ 4. Kxd2 N@e4+ 5. Ke3 Q@e2+ 6. Kxf4 Nd5#.

#2: Taken from NM nochewycandy's games, posted in RobbieGM's Discord server

1. Nf6+ exf6 (1...gxf6 2. P@d7+ Qxd7 3. cxd7+ Kd8 4. P@c7+ Kxc7 5. Nd5+ Kd8 6. P@c7#) 2. Q@d7+!! (2. P@d7+ also leads to a mate, but 2. Q@d7+ is faster) Qxd7 3. cxd7+ Kd8 4. P@c7+ Ke7 5. d8=Q+ Rxd8 6. N@d5+ Ke6 7. Qg4+ f5 8. cxd8=N+ Ke5 9. Nf3+ exf3 10. P@d4#

#3: Taken from NM nochewycandy's games, posted in RobbieGM's Discord server

A queen would of course mate after 1...Bxg2+ 2. Kxg2 N@h4+ 3. Rxh4 (3. Kxh3 Q@g2+ 4. Kxh4 R@h3#) Q@f3+ 4. Kg1 R@h1#. However, Black also has a mate with less pieces: a knight and a pawn. With a knight and pawn, the mate goes: 1...Bxg2+ 2. Kxg2 N@h4+ 3. Kxh3 B@g2+ 4. Kg3 R@h3+ 5. Kg4 P@f5+ 6. Rxf5 exf5+ 7. Kh5 N@f4#. Otherwise, Black does not have enough to mate with the pieces in hand, and they also do not have enough to mate with an extra bishop, an extra knight, or an extra rook. While an extra knight and pawn (from the initial position) are enough to mate, an extra bishop and pawn and an extra rook and pawn are not. I did spend some time making sure there weren't any other economical mates with less pieces, but perhaps a supercomputer, or a superhuman talent, could reveal something I missed!

#4: Taken from ErrantFischer's bughouse page

The answer is reminiscent of Marshall's famous game. 1. Q@g6!! threatening Qxh7#. 1...Qxg6 (1...hxg6 2. N@e7+; 1...fxg6 2. N@e7+) 2. Ne7+ Kh8 3. Nxg6+ fxg6 4. Rxf8+ R@g8 5. N@f7#.

#5: Taken from ErrantFischer's bughouse page

Note that you're playing White on board A (the board to the left) and Black on board B (the board to the right). The board to the right shows the position from Black's perspective; the White pawn on h7 can promote on h8. Unfortunately, the puzzle contest had the wrong perspective for the second board and it seemed as if White's pawn was on a2, but I think it should have been possible to figure out that the boards were incorrectly flipped. Anyway, check out ErrantFischer's solution as it is complete and very well-explained. Follow along here: https://lichess.org/analysis/crazyhouse/7n/2K4P/8/2k5/8/8/8/8/Bp_b_-_-_0_1.

#6: Taken from ErrantFischer's bughouse page

1. Q@d7+ Kb7 2. Qc6+ Kc8 3. Qxe6+ Kb7 4. Qxd5+ Kc8 5. Qe6+ P@d7 6. Qxd7+ Kb7 7. Qc6+ Kc8 8. Qe6+ N@d7 and you get the point. Eventually Black will run out of blockers and White will be able to deliver mate. The full lines goes (the order of Black's drop blocks doesn't really matter) 1. Q@d7+ Kb7 2. Qc6+ Kc8 3. Qxe6+ Kb7 4. Qxd5+ Kc8 5. Qe6+ P@d7 6. Qxd7+ Kb7 7. Qd5+ Kc8 8. Qe6+ P@d7 9. Qxd7+ Kb7 10. Qc6+ Kc8 11. Qe6+ P@d7 12. Qxd7+ Kb7 13. Qc6+ Kc8 14. Qe6+ N@d7 15. Qxd7+ Kb7 16. Qd5+ Kc8 17. Qe6+ B@d7 18. Qxd7+ Kb7 19. Qd5+ Kc8 20. Qe6+ R@d7 21. Qxd7+ Kb7 22. Qd5+ Kc8 23. Qe6+ Kb7 24. Bc6+ Ka6 25. Qc4+ Ka5 26. Qa4#. The mate is 26 moves deep from the starting position. ErrantFischer's intended 1. Q@d7+ Kb7 2. Qc6+ Kc8 3. Qxe6+ Kb7 4. Qxd5+ Kc8 5. Qf5+ Kb7 6. Qxe4+ Kc8 7. Qg4+ Kb7 8. Qxf3+ Kc8 9. Qxh3+ Kb7 is a bit longer but also correct; as he notes, his solution could take 42 moves to give mate.

#7: Taken from ErrantFischer's bughouse page

Black's king seems incredibly safe. How in the world does White have a forced mate in this position? Well, this is the power of cylindrical chess! If you found it hard to wrap your head around how the pieces move in cylindrical chess, there is a simple solution: when you are considering how diagonal-moving pieces, such as the queen or bishop, move, extend the diagonal to the square that's on the opposite side of the board and one rank ahead of the last square of the diagonal in question. So, for example, the queen on d2 in this position can move to a5. From a5, it can pivot to h6 — the opposite side of the board and one rank ahead of a5. Similarly, the bishop on d1 can travel to h5 in one go — from a4. Actually, the bishop on d1 can take the pawn on f7 in one fell swoop as it travels along the d1-c2-b3-a4-h5-g6-f7 path. The solution starts with 1. Qf8+! forcing 1...Kxf8 and then 2. B@b4+!! (the bishop also checks from h6 as it can travel there from b4-a5), which forces Ke8 as the only move. It took me about two hours to solve this puzzle, even though in retrospect it seems rather simple once one gets it. I had initially missed White's third move after 2...Ke8: the amazing 3. Bxf7+!, which forces 3...Kxf7. It seems as if Black's king is escaping and White's checks seem to be running out, but now comes the stunning 4. Bb3 ... #! Yes, that's mate. From b3, the bishop covers the h5-e8 diagonal as it can travel there from a4 to h5, and the bishop on b4 covers the g7 square from a5-h6. Bewitching! This has to be, by far, one of my favorite puzzles across all chess variants.

A very nice composition by ErrantFischer!

Also, a funny story: ErrantFischer did not put up the solution to this puzzle and obviously no solution can be found online. So, I had to solve it myself first (it took about 2 hours, mostly because I did not see 3. Bxf7+ at first). However, I posted this puzzle contest before I knew the solution, so I had to trust that I would be able to solve it and also trust that ErrantFischer's puzzle is not cooked!

Thanks to chika_kyoko and Viro90 for discussing the puzzles to allow me to improve the explanations of the solutions!

Unfortunately, not a single person messaged me their solutions. This is baffling to me as a free trip is on the line! Alas, as we will see in the next section, bughouse is not quite popular and bughouse solving is even less popular. If chika_kyoko and Viro90 do not accept the free trip, a separate contest will be run for this trip.

Epilogue & The Future of Bughouse

There are many reasons why I like promoting bughouse. First, I just find the game to be incredibly beautiful and deep. Not only is it deep from a "game complexity" perspective, but it is also vastly rich in terms of ideas. Consider players A and B playing on board 1 and players C (C is partnered to A) and D (D is partnered to B) playing on board 2. Player A is attacking B, but B finds a strong defense. As A's attack is stalling, what does A do? A tells C to start their own attack and informs them that they will start "feeding" (a bughouse term for giving your partner pieces) them. In another situation, player B needs a knight to mate and their partner, player D, has just 10 seconds to get the knight, so they get very creative with their piece drops to force the knight. This is but a small sample of the very rich game play inherent to bughouse. Check out the answers to the puzzle contest if you want more bughouse beauty!

Second, I am just constantly flabbergasted that bughouse is so unpopular. It is by many respects the most played chess variants and a significant proportion of chess players have tried it at least once. It is also much more social compared to chess and can be a very fun game to play with chess friends. How, then, is it possible that in any given day online, there are, by my own estimates, not much more than 100 unique people playing bughouse? Is bughouse just a common but rare guest, played once in a blue moon by most chess players? The answer seems to be yes, and I find that to be greatly disappointing. Indeed, I love to play bughouse myself, so I also have a rather selfish reason in promoting bughouse: I want to have more potential opponents and find games more quickly!

Third and most important, I think bughouse can serve as a microcosm for proper community-driven efforts. The state of sports in general reflects the state of the world in general. Incompetent, power-hungry people displace competent, power-averse people (and even competent, power-hungry people!), and this necessarily makes the world a much darker place than it needs to be. Fortunately, there are exceptions, and I am writing these words on one of the biggest and best examples of the beauty of collaboration — Lichess! I hope that the bughouse world can make use of the likeness of the people volunteering at Lichess and other charities that are doing good in the world. Bughouse needs and deserves better!

I hope that this post has served to not only recap the 2024 Toronto International Bughouse Tournament, but to also make more bughouse tournaments possible. Who knows, maybe more people will be excited to run bughouse tournaments and imbue the bughouse world with the flaming spirit it as a game so possesses. For now, sac your queen and keep enjoying bughouse!