Boxing and chess are two competitive past-times that appear, on the surface, very unlikely bedfellows. Boxing is a sport that is both violent and physically grueling, requiring fighters to be conditioned like machines. Chess, on the other hand, is a thinking-man’s game that players can enjoy well into their senior years, but which also requires great discipline if one wishes to become a grandmaster.
Boxing is often perceived to be a sport reserved for physically gifted brutes, while chess is reserved for the intelligent, soft-spoken nerds of the world. While these are merely stereotypes, they are presented to us in films and on television so regularly that they have become generally accepted in our society.
That’s probably why most people find the idea behind chessboxing to be so bizarre.
Chessboxing is a hybrid sport that combines the athleticism of boxing with the cerebral sparring found in chess. According to the World Chess Boxing Organization’s official website (that’s right, there’s a WCBO), chessboxing is a sport inspired by Enki Bilal, a French comic artist who is credited with creating the concept for chessboxing in his 1993 graphic novel Froid Équateur. Building off of Bilal’s idea, a number of interested competitors formed an underground community, and as interest in the fledgling sport grew, the WCBO was finally created in 2003. Since its inception, the WCBO has held three to four championship fights each year — this on top of the numerous local events that take place across Europe.
Now that you know how chessboxing came to exist, let’s go over the basic rules.
A regulation chessboxing match consists of two round types: three minute boxing rounds and four minute chess rounds. Starting off with chess, the two combatants alternate between boxing and chess rounds for a maximum 11 rounds (six rounds of chess, five rounds of boxing) with one minute intervals between each round.
Speed chess rules are used for the chess rounds and each player is allotted 12 minutes each for the entire match. The fight can end one of several ways: knockout, checkmate, getting your opponent to run out of chess time or having the referee stop the fight.
When some friends and I first heard about chessboxing several years ago we thought it was a farce. After several drinks at a party, someone stumbled across a chess board and a friend of mine challenged me to a chessboxing match. As neither of us were trained boxers or capable speed chess players, we tweaked the rules a bit for the purposes of making things simpler.
Due to my fading memory of the evening — likely hindered further by the alcohol consumed that night — I cannot recall many specifics of my first and only delve into the world of chessboxing. What sticks out in my mind to this day, however, was how difficult it was to maintain any continuity, switching between boxing and chess. Before too long, we had both thrown in the proverbial towel and declared the match a draw. From that day forward I respected chessboxing as one of the greatest combat sports ever conceived.
Consider, for a moment, how insanely difficult it must be to win a fight. Even though the boxing and the chess are confined to their own rounds, a fighter must always be thinking about his next chess moves during the boxing round and always be contemplating how to take advantage of his opponent’s weaknesses in the ring while playing chess. I don’t know about you, but if I’ve taken a couple devastating blows in a boxing ring, it might be a tad difficult for me to recall what strategy I was trying to deploy on the board.
The WCBO itself considers chessboxing to be “the ultimate challenge for both the body and the mind.” The organization even has designs to one day get chessboxing introduced as an Olympic sport.
Of course, you might be thinking, “Well that’s neat, but what’s to stop a devastating boxer like Mike Tyson from competing and winning every match with a knock out in the second round of the fight?”
The WCBO has those loopholes covered in a regulation that states that each fighter must have “a minimum Elo rating of 1,800 in chess.” The Elo rating is an internationally recognized ranking system for chess players, with the all-time greatest chess players topping out with around a 2,800 ELO rating. There’s also the “zugzwang rule,” which stipulates that a chessboxer cannot deliberately delay making a move on the chess board. If a player continues to do so after two warnings from the referee, they are immediately disqualified.
Currently, chessboxing is still a niche sport that is steadily gaining prominence in Germany, the Netherlands and Eastern European countries like Ukraine and Russia. If you’re interested in checking out some fights, you can find several championship bouts uploaded to YouTube.com. After watching my first official chessboxing match just recently, I have to give the WCBO credit for putting on an entertaining event. Chessboxers enter the ring in much the same way that standard boxers would for a main event fight, complete with theme music and a Micheal Buffer-style ring announcer who hypes up the fighters before the fight. With more and more spectators showing up to each subsequent event, the chessboxers are required to wear noise-cancelling earphones to prevent them from receiving strategic help from the crowd.
If chessboxing is something that might interest you, the WCBO suggests that you start training your body and mind right away. The WCBO requires fighters to have experience fighting in 20 standard boxing matches, as well as meeting their Elo rating standards. Suggested chessboxing training methods include “400-metre chess” (sprint for a lap around a running track, then play a three minute round of chess) and “gong chess” (three minutes on the punching bag, four minutes on the chess board).
So if you think you’ve got the physical and mental determination, you might be the first to represent Canada on the chessboxing world stage.
