Coffee and skittles in glitch house

[crazymaharajah]

I noticed that even chess.com nowadays refers to bughouse as name "doubles". This seemed strange to me in the english-speaking world, but it is possible that the original meaning is not so well known anymore.

When people from other countries ask about the origin of "bug house" and why it might have something to do with the game, I point them to features of American culture where hobo was a nickname like adventurers in the adventures of Tom Sawyer. But there is an even more significant aspect of why this game has that name. It has to do with its very essence -- the very thing that literally makes you jump up and down  

I have long been studying how individual words from the origins of chess take on a life of their own in different languages, for example the russian word "шпилить" (play quickly, move) is essentially derived from the german ending "spiel"... or "spielen" (play) ...  Chess in German is Schachspiel and this word part turns into a russian verb somewhere in the past.

The word bughouse, of course, means mental hospital, and as applied to games it was similar to the synonyms found in Pritchard's books - madhouse as one of the early names for bug. A free interpretation of this marginal slang in relation to the game suggests other interpretations.

In the case of bughouse it is quite interesting that the name conveys the state of play and features of the game. A bedbug infested apartment or hotel room makes you itch and bounce from surprise, excitement, suddenness, annoyance, and irritation.  

I think the rare veterans of the game, as well as people who know the language will only confirm my guess.

I had a huge correspondence with a lot of interesting discussions and I still can't make sense of it, understand what was lost, what was left in the mailboxes or I had time to download on my hard drive... With some people I communicated for several years, and with others less because of different circumstances.




As for the crazyhouse, in the context of chess this word occurs quite often and also carries additional meaning, for example, in Beckett's novel "Murphy" in the episode is almost directly crazyhouse chess and in addition notation has a literary and psychoanalytical meaning!

The amazing pychess site that has implemented hybrids of Seiravan chess and zh is also working on making a bughouse implementation and I think it will be better than chess.com

Although chess.com held a world bughouse championship where the team of jefferyx and catask won and it attracted many strong buggers many people don't play there because of their interface.

It would certainly be interesting to have a catalog of all mass bug tournaments.




This is the same as rare old videos that are hard to find because of the low number of views. Some may have already been deleted.

Watch on YouTube

As well as old stuff crazy that can be found in the blogspot archives...  implementation for the game in the browser

The history looks like a collection of disparate cultural artifacts.