Knight to Right Hook

I’m not a sports fan, but I do appreciate a couple of athletic competitions in a very casual way: Hockey. Easy to follow, action packed, and beautiful. Volleyball. Also easy to follow, action packed, and, if Top Gun is to be believed, very, very beautiful. I simply never connected with sports and it wasn’t something my parents ever encouraged. Thank you GenX parenting-by-osmosis. Sure, you didn’t always (or ever) know where your kids were or what they were doing, but as long as it wasn’t costing you a lot of money, you also weren’t inclined to figure it out. My road not taken could be strewn with bowling trophies and water polo medals!

But now I have to rethink all of this because Chessboxing has entered the chat. This could be for me; it combines two things I love: tchotchkes and oversized gloves.

Admittedly, Chessboxing sounds like something George Costanza made up to impress a date or get a job or get out of a job, but I assure you it is 100% legitimate. Chessboxing is an actual sport where players alternate between playing chess and pummeling one another. I’m pretty disappointed in human ingenuity that it took so long for someone to put these two clearly complementary sports together. How did we ever send people into space?

The origins of the sport are a little light. But in the late-1970s, two teenage brothers named James and Stuart Robinson from the neighborhood of Kidbrooke in Southeast London, spent most afternoons boxing at the Samuel Montague Youth Centre. According to an interview with James in 2012: “One day a trainer never turned up and there was a chess club down there on the same night. We thought, what’s this going on? Why don’t we try chess and boxing?” I suppose if there had been a sewing club in the same space the future of the sport would have turned out much differently and with a lot more sequins and applique.

Over the next three years, James and Stuart made this weird between-fight-interlude a regular thing. It eventually attracted a crowd and even some press. However, no one knew what they were watching or when to scream for a knock out and when to shut the hell up so the young competitors could figure out whether to start with a Sicilian Defense or come out swinging with a classic Ruy Lopez. As if regular sports aren’t confusing enough. Traveling! The one-point safety! Man the jibe! Release the hounds! Who can figure any of it out?

Word traveled slowly about what the Robinsons were up to. To be fair it was the late-1970s, a time with phone books and personal ads. The most effective way to pass information was for your mother to lean out the window and holler it to your friend in the street below. But someone was paying attention out there.

In 1979 the kung fu film,The Mystery of Chess Boxing, hit movie theatres. The plot involves a young man seeking revenge on Ghost Faced Killer for his father’s death. He eventually finds an old Chinese chess master named Chi Sue Tin. The master schools the young man in the ways of chess boxing kung fu. The two team up and deploy their combined chessboxing-fu superpowers to defeat Ghost Faced Killer. Roll credits. I have two thoughts about this: First, no one has optioned a sequel to this movie, but we’re stuck with The Fast and Furious 19? Second, if a sport shows up in a kung fu action film, I think it deserves immediate approval from the International Olympic Committee.

Tick forward a couple of decades to 1992 when a French comic book artist named Enki Bilal released a science fiction graphic novel series titled The Nikopol Trilogy. In it, characters box on a chessboard floor. This supposedly caught the attention of Iepe Rubingh, a Dutch performance artist, who became inspired to bring this image to life in a really big way. Rubingh hosted and competed in the first official chessboxing match in 2003 in Amsterdam. The World Chessboxing Organization was established soon after.

Rook to pawn-12 do not pass Go, do not collect $200 to G-9. I just sunk your battleship, pal.

The motto of the World Chessboxing Organization is “Fighting is done in the ring and wars are waged on the board.” Have we just stumbled upon the plot to Rocky X? (Image via Daily Sabah)

In other words: Chessboxing got serious, you guys. Between 2003 and 2011 chessboxing training clubs sprouted across Europe. The first European Chessboxing Championship was held in 2005 in Berlin. From there the sport has continued to spread around the world with clubs in America, Asia, India, Iran, and, of course, Russia. Annual matches, tournaments, and championships have taken place all over the globe since 2008. In 2024 a chessboxing exhibition took place as part of the Paris Olympics’ Cultural Olympiad event. Could official Olympic sports status be far behind? Those competitive hobby horse folks better watch their backs.

What happens at a chessboxing match?

Opponents alternate between three-minute rounds of boxing and “speed” chess for a total of eleven rounds (the match begins and ends with chess: six chess rounds, five boxing). There are one-minute breaks in between to allow for the competitors to lose their gloves and retire to the chess board, which is moved in and out of the boxing ring. The winner is declared by knockout, checkmate, or referee decision. Because this is still in the boxing domain, players are classed by the conventional weight designations of lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight, and light heavyweight. Not only do you have to know your stuff in the boxing ring, but to be eligible to compete you also have to prove your bonafides as a speed chess player, which involves some different skills than traditional chess matches.

Chessboxing is a fascinating clash between brains and brawn. The context switching from sitting (sweating) over a chess board and engaging with your brain to work out complicated moves for a few minutes to then refire your adrenaline in order to physically vanquish your opponent is wild. That’s a rare kind of dual elitism that a player has to bring to the ring. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me like the people who should be dominating this sport are moms. After all, they’re the ones going more than six rounds with their toddlers–mentally outwitting their kids in one moment– “If you keep crying, Bluey will go away forever!”--and wrestling them into their clothes, their beds, the bathtub the next. And there are no breaks between matches, which last anywhere from 10 minutes to 35 years. The winner is declared by whomever moves out of the house or runs out of money first.

Check and mate.