The Bughouse Effect

What happens when you work closely with someone on a really difficult project—and then they seem to just fuck it up?

This is a post about two Chess variants; one very special emotion; and how life is kinda like Chess Bughouse. Let's goooooo!

1. Crazyhouse

My favorite time-waster is Crazyhouse Chess. Crazyhouse Chess is mostly like regular Chess. In regular Chess, players take turns making a move, Bishops go diagonally and Rooks go straight, and you try to trap your opponent's King to win the game:

(From Lev Milman vs. Joseph Fang courtesy of https://www.chess.com/article/view/10-most-beautiful-checkmates.)

In Chess, if you take a piece, it just leaves the board. In Crazyhouse, the difference is that when you take an opponent's piece, you get to use it. Say you take a Black Bishop; then you get a White Bishop in your hand. When it's your turn, you can either do a regular boring Chess move (with one of your pieces already on the board)—or you can drop a piece from your hand onto the board. To illustrate, watch how when I take the opponent's Bishop, a Bishop appears in my hand at the lower right hand corner; and then next turn, I place it on the board:

(My moves here may not be the most accurate way to play, but they are the funniest.)

You can drop pieces absolutely anywhere, including to give check. (You just can't put Pawns on the very top or very bottom rows.) So, the game can end by surprise:

(You can't hear because it's a .gif, but I'm saying "Oh... I didn't realize that was mate.".)

Those last two gifs were from the same game. The opposing King moved all the way across the board, at the behest of my pieces dropping from the sky. I kept taking pieces from my opponent, so I kept having pieces to drop on the board to continue my attack. (Full game here.)

In Crazyhouse, this sort of chain reaction is common, where you attack using pieces you took during the attack. It's also common that an apparently safe King gets suddenly pried loose from his protective fortress and subjected to mortal threats. This makes games swingy. Very swingy. For Crazyhouse games, the computer evaluation bar, which says who is winning at each point in the game[1], not uncommonly looks like this:

(Ah yes, Chess, the classic game of chance.)

Piece drops can happen anywhere. This makes for complicated tactics and very strange, never-before-seen positions. They are always hard to calculate, and sometimes beautiful:

(I think I've heard of that one, that's called the Four Knights Attack, right?)

The combination of sharp tactics, the tempo turning on a dime, pieces coming at you from anywhere, and strange un-Chess-like positions, provides a very crazy-making fun-making experience. I sometimes compare it to regular Chess. It is said that Chess is an argument, where you have to build up your own case, and ask your opponent a series of increasingly uncomfortable questions until they crumble under the pressure. So if slow Chess is a civilized, erudite argument, and blitz Chess is a shouting match, then Crazyhouse is a "duel": You and your opponent stand 6 feet apart, facing each other with your mouths open, and you try to lob lit firecrackers down each other's throats[2]. Crazy.

But here's another question: Does Crazyhouse produce rage?

2. Crazyhouse rage?

Not much, in my experience. Not more than any other fast-paced competitive game. You can definitely get very mad, like if the opponent plays bad or has a lower rating but still wins, or if you lose for a "fake" reason like a mouse-slip or your time running out.

But it's not deeply enraging, as far as I've seen. You occasionally get some salt in the chat, but it's pretty tame—at worst, "fuck you" or "lucky" or similar.

3. Bughouse

Bughouse is four-player Crazyhouse, a.k.a. doubles Chess. There are two teams of two. Each team has one player with White pieces, and one with Black pieces. Here you see TeamTop on the top, with TeamTop-White on the left, and TeamTop-Black on the right; and opposing them, there's TeamBottom-Black on the left, and TeamBottom-White on the right.

Say TeamTop-Black (top right) takes that White Knight on g6 from his opponent, TeamBottom-White. So then TeamTop-Black gives that White Knight to his teammate, TeamTop-White (top left). Which makes sense, because it's a White Knight and she's playing with the White pieces. On her turn, she can place that Knight on her board, the left board, just like in Crazyhouse. (Since the piece doesn't have to switch colors, you can easily play Bughouse in person.)

The two games on the two boards just go simultaneously and independently, except that pieces are constantly shuttling back and forth. Also, if one player loses, whether by checkmate or by running out of time, their team loses.

Before, in Crazyhouse, the branching factor is high—the opponent could place any of their pieces anywhere on the board. But the game was still in a sense self-contained—perfect information just looking at your board, deterministic except for one opponent, fixed turn order. Now, in Bughouse, pieces can come out of nowhere at any time from the other board. It's like if you're boxing, but many times during the bout, a disembodied fist comes out of nowhere and punches you. You better have constant vigilance.

If blitz Chess is a shouting match, and Crazyhouse is a firecracker lobbing duel, then Bughouse is hackysack with hand grenades.

This takes the Craziness of Crazyhouse and ramps it up to 11:

Bughouse also makes you very interdependent with your teammate. For one thing, if they lose, you lose. But it's much more than that. Every little decision they make can derail your whole position on your board, and vice versa; even them taking 3 seconds longer on a move can put you in a much tougher spot.

This interdependence opens up the opportunity to experience a special new emotion.

4. Treachery!

Let's go through one full example.

So, you're playing Bughouse on the internet. You're very rusty because you haven't played much in years, and you're doing research for a blog post. Your play is far from perfect, but you put strong pressure on your opponent, and his King is drawn way out. Your King is also exposed, so you MUST keep attacking and checking his King, otherwise he'll take the initiative and attack back. You ask your teammate to trades pieces on their board, so that you have more pieces to drop on your board and continue the attack. Your attack is running low on steam—you've got the White King surrounded, but not quite checkmated. You're out of good checks on the board, and you have no Black pieces in hand to drop and deliver mate. (See the bigger board on the left:)

You play on. You have been begging your teammate to TRADE. Your teammate has not done that thing that you asked for them to do. Now it is a critical moment:

The White King on f4 is far afield, completely naked. But you're in check from the White Bishop on h4, and you probably can't afford to just move your King aside. You MUST block, ideally with check. Conveniently, your teammate has the opponent's Black Rook just sitting there on g8, ready to be gobbled up by the Knight on e7. If they take the Rook, you can immediately drop it on f6, blocking check and also CHECKING THE WHITE KING, keeping the initiative! You beg them to take the Rook.

To translate that chat history:

  • Trade pieces [because I have an attack and need pieces to continue attacking]
  • Trade pieces
  • Trade pieces
  • Trade pieces
  • Move now [because we're in a tight time crunch]
  • Move now
  • Move now
  • Move now
  • take [the Rook that's been sitting there for 10 seconds]
  • go [make moves, we're in a time crunch]
  • Trade pieces
  • Move now

But your teammate has other ideas. Yes, now is the time to spend 14 seconds before taking the Rook. (Which is completely disastrous, because now your team is down on time, so your teammate's opponent can stall and prevent you from getting more pieces to attack with.) So your attack peters out and you lose on time. You asked them for what you needed, they could have given it to you, but they did it too slowly and all your effort mounting an attack is for naught.

[[If you want you can view the whole game here: https://www.chess.com/game/live/157232852789. Press the "flip board" button, very bottom-right, to see it from my perspective. Click the Partner tab on the right to see both boards. Arrow keys to step through moves.]]

Why did they do that? What was your teammate thinking? Maybe they're thinking "My King position is weak, I have to check for possible fatal attacks before playing a non-defensive move.". Maybe they're thinking about the position and not reading the chat. Maybe they're thinking Arby's. Maybe they forgot they were playing Bughouse. Science may never know. But one thing's for sure: They are an absolute knob.

When I needed them most, they failed me. And now we both have a big fat L forever. Are they happy?

5. Bughouse Rage

Since Bughouse positions are so explosive and sensitive to small decisions, there's lots of ways your teammate can fail you. They didn't trade enough. They traded too much and gave your opponent pieces to attack you. They played too slow. They gave away a Knight even though you said "No Knights!" and the Knight checkmated you. They kept playing and GOT THEMSELVES CHECKMATED even though YOUR OPPONENT WAS 100% ABOUT TO LOSE if only your teammate would just STOP like you TOLD THEM TO DO FIVE TIMES IN THE CHAT until you hit the limit on how many times the chat lets you say stop.

This kind of fuck-up engenders deep rage.

For me this is a special kind of rage. It's not simple, like a shot of vodka.

It's complex, like a fine wine, with a bright attack: the delusion of cooperation getting shattered. The mid-palate is betrayal-anger, with an aroma of contempt, and notes of pain and confusion: How can it possibly be that you want to win—and then you go and play like that?? The finish is spite, and a trace of despair: If this is what other people are like, why try to work with them on anything even slightly difficult?

Well, it's like a wine, except that you're chugging it. It's also explosive and crunchy and feels like something is tearing up your gut trying to get out. I guess it's like if you swallowed a pint of pop-rocks and let nature do its thing.

(Yes, Watermelo Punch, that's what I want to do to my teammate.)

I have tasted Bughouse Rage. I don't like it, so I stopped. But I've tasted it.

I have seen others engage in the rage. When I mess up in online Bughouse, my teammate might Rage at me—using basically the nastiest possible language that gets through chess.com's obscenity filter. When I win, sometimes I stick around after the game to watch the fireworks in the chat from the other team.

6. Bughouse and life

In a lot of ways, online Bughouse with strangers is a perfect storm to create this emotion:

  • The communication is low-throughput.
  • Your team has strongly aligned goals, but no personal relationship and no way to do sane post-mortems and punishments.
  • You tense yourself for sustained, effortful thinking—and then BAM your teammate ruins it all.
  • You're very interdependent, but lack shared context—one board is more than enough to keep track of, let alone two.
  • There's no incentive for you to go back and look at the game through your teammate's eyes.

Still, I think the Bughouse Effect shows up a lot in real life, even if it's in a less pure form. It often happens that there's a team of people, and one of them gets very angry about a mistake made by their teammate, and their anger seems out of proportion with the mistake. Whenever that happens, I think of the Bughouse Effect.

So, in a slight deviation from the long tradition of comparing Chess to life, we will now compare Bughouse to life. Here are a couple case studies:

6.1. Christian Bale bugging out

Christian Bale was acting in the filming of Terminator Salvation in 2008. Audio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0auwpvAU2YA) was leaked in 2009 of an altercation between him and the director of photography, who was apparently moving around on or near the set during a scene and distracting Bale. You can hear that Bale is, basically, really really pissed off.

It's hard to tell without the full context, but it certainly seems like he's being an asshole. However, you can also hear that he's not just being an asshole. Bale's anger has a perfectly understandable basis, relating to his teammate interfering with his efforts. He hammers home several times that he's pissed because the DP seems to not understand the effect his movements have on Bale trying to act. This echoes something you might see (more... curtly) in the aftermath of a rough Bughouse game: Why didn't you read the fucking chat? Do you have any concept of how that fucks with my ability to stay safe and finish attacks? I hope you had fun saccing the pieces that got me mated. Did I do that to you? You're an amateur.

Similar things happen with leaders in general. There's lots of stories of heads of projects being harsh, impatient, and apparently callous. In some cases they could just be an asshole. But I would guess that in many cases, it's not that they are power-tripping, but rather that they are under a lot of pressure. They're trying to do something hard, and trying to delegate. So then, it's extra super frustrating if the delegee does something that makes it seem like they are totally clueless, or maybe aren't even trying to do the right thing at all.

(This is not at all to excuse this behavior. Especially as an employer, or as a huge actor who presumably has a lot of power. That power presumably is a big part of why Bale allowed himself to act like that in the first place.)

6.2. My stag is best stag

The Stag Hunt is an abstract game, like the Prisoner's Dilemma, that serves as a simplified model for many real-life situations. In the Stag Hunt, each hunter can choose to hunt Stag or Hare. If they both hunt Stag, they're successful and they both get a lot of food. If someone hunts Hare, he'll get a Hare, which is a bit of food. But, if one of them hunts Stag while the other hunts Hare, the Stag hunter gets nothing:

This means that if each hunter knows the other will hunt Stag, then they both individually want to choose Stag (because it will work), and then they'll actually get the Stag. But if either is uncertain of what the other will do, then hunting Stag won't work, so they'll hunt Hare instead.

How does this apply to real life? Basically any group project is a kind of Stag Hunt. If you can all get on the same page with each other about what the goal is, you have a good shot at making it happen; but if you cannot get on the same page about the goal, then it's better to just go work on your separate personal projects.

Some goals are fairly easy to get on the same page about, like "let's each lift our end of the couch at the same time". But many goals are more difficult to find a teammate for. It might be a rare goal to share, or it might be hard to tell when someone else has that same goal.

For example, there's a certain kind of conversation I like, where we speculate and theorize. New hypotheses can be brought up and seriously considered, even if they seem strange or implausible or unclear; lots of ideas and questions are kicked up and considered intensely, but not hypercritically. This kind of conversation is like an indoor Butterfly Conservatory for protecting a collection of Butterfly Ideas.

Sometimes I find someone who seems like they are probably interested in having a butterfly-conservatory conversation. This is exciting! I've found someone with a shared goal, maybe; now we can hunt Stag together.

So I start in with the butterfly ideas... And then gradually realize that something is off. They might be overly critical, or not really trying to add their own speculation, or just bringing things back to more trivial topics at inappropriate times.

Eventually I figure out that they just don't happen to be interested in having the type of conversation that I wanted to have. We have different goals, ok, no problem. It would be inappropriate to get really angry in this situation.

But it can nevertheless Bug me, with a note of the Bughouse Effect. The transition period can be frustrating and disorienting, when I'm still assuming they're up for a Butterfly Conservatory conversation but I'm seeing how poorly they're doing it. I gathered up my energy to think hard about new ideas; and now the other person is leaving me high and dry.

Over time, I've learned to more carefully avoid overinvesting in imagined shared goals. I've also learned to pay closer attention to whether I'm incorrectly assuming a shared goal, so I can update my beliefs quickly.

If I'm incorrectly imagining that there's someone there, trying to play the same game I'm trying to play, it's kinda like if I think I'm playing Bughouse (with a teammate) but actually I'm playing Crazyhouse on my own. I could get into a position where I can checkmate my opponent, if only I had a Queen to drop on the board, and then cry out to the heavens: "Won't someone please send me a Queen??" But I'm playing Crazyhouse and there's no one there who's trying to send me pieces, and it doesn't make sense to get angry at the sky.

6.3. Are you people even trying to save the world?

If anyone builds AGI, everyone dies. So, like, we should stop that from happening. The plans you want to invest in, to stop that from happening, sometimes depend on when you think AGI is likely to be built.

For some reason, most people working on this seem to have reached a comfortable consensus of "AGI is going to come really really soon, like a few years or a decade". This is very very annoying to me, because I think there's a pretty substantial chance that AGI isn't built for a few decades or more.

Now, some plans are crucial whether you think AGI will come in years or decades; we definitely want to stop AGI capabilities research immediately. But when people have de facto confident short timelines, which I don't think makes sense, they significantly underinvest in important plans, such as human intelligence amplification.

I can reflect on this situation, and I can see that, in part, different people are just looking at different parts of the world. You're looking at your board, and I'm looking at mine:

But that doesn't stop it from being immensely frustrating when your ally is doing it wrong. And there's not necessarily recourse; there's no easy way to have a debate with an amorphous diaphanous distributed tacit quasi-consensus. (Aside: this is not quite the same thing as the narcissism of small differences[3].)

I also get a bit of this feeling if a wealthy entrepreneur gets interested in reprogenetics, and wants to invest and make cool tech—but then is mysteriously uninterested in funding the slightly less sexy, but actually much more important science that is prerequisite to the really interesting versions of the technology.

From one perspective, it doesn't make sense for me to get angry at them. They're still investing in the area, that's still great, and it's still very helpful compared to the default of not helping at all. But from the other perspective, if you're investing in the area, then you're also the one who is supposed to do the actually right version of working in the area. So when you're not, it's frustrating, and it feels like you're close to doing the really good version, so I really want to nudge you in that direction. (This is related to how people with responsibility, who are doing a pretty good job, get a lot more criticism and hostility than people who aren't helping at all; e.g. leaders of many kinds, or creators of open-source utilities.)

I don't actually feel rage in these situations, but I do feel some real anger, and the anger feels similar to bona FIDE Bughouse Rage. It's the feeling of we are on the same team but why are you acting like that are you oblivious or incompetent or what.

7. Conclusion: Symmetrization

I want to point at one last thing.

The Bughouse Effect is a perfect application for symmetrization. That's where you're angry at someone for their behavior, but then you think of times you've done basically that exact same behavior in an analogous position. You can ask: When I was in a time crunch, was I paying close attention my teammate's board, so that I avoid losing a piece that would be dangerous in my teammate's opponent's hands? When I was asked to not lose a Knight, did I immediately see that, or did it take me a few seconds to see the message, and by then I'd already traded a Knight?

And then... you can still be mad. But, if you want (hint: you should want), you can at least:

  1. Be mad precisely—mad at the right things, rather than at everything.
  2. Be mad in a way that is fair, in accordance with the Golden Rule—mad in the same way that you think people should be mad at you, when you do that same behavior.

Betrayal is very important to react to; a terminally unreliable teammate is very important to react to; and also, everyone messes up sometimes and other people don't know what you know, so sometimes it was just a bad situation.

There's more to be said about feelings and other reactions around working together on difficult things. I'll leave that to you. Have you experienced the Bughouse Effect? What was it like? What happened next? What maybe ought to happen?

8. Epilogue

While Doing Research (playing board games) for this blog post, I wanted to screenshot the Bughouse chat. But it is so small on chess.com. See?

Oh, you not see it? Because eez invisible? Here, I very nice, I help you:

I had assumed I was just a goof, and a power user would have the settings configured so that the chat is actually readable. But no. Apparently it's impossible to change the size (short of maybe cooking up some javascript manual html manipulation nonsense), and this is just a years-old bug that has not been fixed. That just goes to show... something. Maybe the Bughouse Effect is more The Chess.com Bughouse Effect. Always open your lines of communication. Indeed, playing Bughouse in person with friends, where you can actually talk and also don't want to be mean, is much much friendlier.

  1. The computer evaluation is, as I understand it, taken from a Chess-playing computer program's rating of the current position. The Chess program rates positions in order to judge which position to enter, i.e. which move to make. There are Chess programs that are superhuman at many variants of Chess, including Crazyhouse. The question that the evaluation bar answers is, roughly, "How much better is the current position for White, if two Crazyhouse Chess programs started playing from this position?". Since Crazyhouse is very sharp (high branching factor, many forcing lines, runaway attacks), often the Crazyhouse Chess program can find a forced checkmate in (say) 8 moves that's very difficult for a human to directly find. (Often the Crazyhouse program's evaluations take a while to stabilize, so the displayed evaluation bars might be a bit inaccurate, but still give a generally accurate impression I think.) ↩︎

  2. What I mean here is that, whereas Go is high-branching but maybe a pretty positional / continuous game (with several somewhat decoupled simultaneous battles; IDK, I don't play Go), and Chess is low-branching and sometimes pretty sharp, Crazyhouse on the other hand is very high-branching and very sharp (e.g. you can easily get a lost position in one or two moves in a surprising non-obvious way). ↩︎

  3. The Bughouse Effect is one source for the narcissism of small differences (NoSD). But NoSD is more general; I think it describes any situation where two people or groups are very similar, and this somehow generates conflict. You could have NoSD because of a Bughouse Effect, e.g. because you're so close to having the right political strategy, but then this small difference makes it seem like you're totally oblivious and wrong, or possible a traitor. But you could also have it because of an uncanny valley type dynamic, where you're straight up annoyed about something that looks similar but isn't; you might for example worry that other people will treat you as the same, even though you're not the same. NoSD between similar religious communities can be understood as a fight over the derivative / trajectory of the values of the total community; it makes sense to think about small differences in that context, just like it makes sense for us in our daily lives to think more about our current problems (which we have to fix) than about how things are already great (which we don't have to fix). Yet another source would be competition—someone who's too similar to you will compete against you for things. ↩︎