I Built a Chess Engine for 6 6 Crazyhouse — Now It's #1 on chess.com

Hey folks! I'm Vladimir, a backend developer. Over the past 9 months, my side project — a chess engine for an obscure chess variant — went from a "what if..." idea to #1 on the chess.com leaderboard . No neural networks. Just good old alpha-beta search, written in Rust. If you're into chess programming, CPU-bound optimization, or bridging Python and Rust via PyO3 — this one's for you. What is Minihouse? chess.com has a "Variants" section with alternative chess modes. One of them is Minihouse (aka 6×6 Crazyhouse): 6×6 board instead of 8×8 (no queen, one pawn each) Crazyhouse mechanic : when you capture a piece, it goes into your "hand" — and you can drop it back onto any empty square instead of making a regular move This completely changes the game. In standard chess, material is lost permanently. Here, every trade gives both players new pieces to drop. Tactics dominate strategy. Games often end in 5–10 moves with a surprise checkmate from a dropped knight. There are powerful engines fo