Monday, friendly games

Monday's program was basically the same as Sunday's, weather too. It was about time that the Geneva gathering managed to get two straight days of good weather, because less and less buggers were believing me when I was saying that rain was rare in Geneva summers.

We met the canadian André Mercier, a 2100 player who had never heard about bughouse, and went to initiate him. As he partnered Firefly, their team began to do very much OK after some training games. It must be said that André is a fast learner: after his first half-hour of bughouse he got in a game where he was two seconds up; as soon as his opponent began to sit for some stuff he told "don't move" like a professional buggers (except that professional buggers usually say "sit").

One trick he didn't learn is the "wait, are there the cops here?" tried by Tjeulesbetes against me in a game where he was mated and 2 seconds down. Fortunately, I am less interested by cops than by bughouse and I didn't lose any time in the process.

I was less succesful in a next game where everybody was sitting with (I thought) half a second up for me. Everybody was analysing hard but nobody thought about checking for the time, and it just did for a double flag that we wouldn't even have noticed at once if the clock weren't set to beep.

Firefly and me left the place for some time in the afternoon in order to play some badminton in a gym hall. After the bughouse and the ping-pong, I just had to kick this guy's ass at something!

The most bughouse-hungry players don't even stop playing in order to eat. In a simul bughouse game + sandwich, Firefly asked his opponent Ishamael "mmh mmh, mmh mmh, mmh mmh mmh mmh?", which the latter correctly understood as "what do you have in hand?". Bughouse players have tremendous communication skills.