If It’s Your First Night at Chess Club, You Have to Fight

Jesse | Published on Aug 25, 2009

Check!

Nobody likes a sore loser. And even worse is a sore winner. And if it’s a cocky victor or a whiny newbie that pushes your wrong buttons, then maybe you should consider chess boxing.  It’s intellectual, you get to beat the snot out of your opponent (and take some bitter pleasure in it if he’s a whiny loser), and if you suck at chess then you can win by moving your fist to his kisser.
Chess boxing sounds- and looks- like a weird TV game show idea gone wrong. The prophet of the sport/game, a cartoonist by the name of Enki Bilal, delivered his vision in 1992 as a major plot point in his graphic novel Froid-Equateur. A Ducth artist known as lepe Rubingh took the novel to heart and, out of inspiration, pulled Bilal’s wacky idea off the pages of his novel and brought it to life in the spring of 2004. He fought under the nickname “lepe the Joker”.  The idea of chess boxing was also used in the 1991 Finnish movie Uuno Turhapuro – hera Helsingin herra, whee Uuno, the main character, plays a game of chess with a person over a hands-free phone while duking it out with someone else.

If you can believe it, the sport is governed by its own World Chess Boxing Organization.  Its motto? “Fighting is done in the ring and wars are waged on the board”. The first global championship was hosted in Amsterdam in 2003. lepe Rubingh himself emerged as champion. The first European Chess Boxing Championship happened in Berlin on October 1st, 2005. Tihomir Atanassov Dovramadjiev from Bulgaria wiped the floor with Andreas ‘D’Schneider of Germany after the latter chess boxer gave in during the 7th round (how often do you see people admit defeat in a game of chess before the checkmate?).  And on April 21, 2006, over 400 onlookers gathered together in the Gloria Theatre in Cologne to watched two chess boxing matches. Zoran “the Priest” Mijatovic opened with the Queen’s Gambit (an opening move involving the two pawns in front and on the left of the queen to cross up two squares, making an opening for a quick potential checkmate), but “Anti Terror” Frank Stoldt held through.  In the 7th round, Mijatovic saw he was only three moves away from being hit with checkmate, so he admitted defeat. Stoldt also threw his weight around in the boxing portions of the match.

For those of you who have always been intrigued by the idea of pausing your game of chess to intermittently clobber each other silly, the rules are surprisingly simple for such a bizarre sport.  A match of chess boxing constitutes of two opponents engaged in a game of speed chess – each player has twelve minutes for the entire game.  The game is started with a four minute chess round, then alternates two minutes of boxing. This goes on until a judge intervenes or one of the players is knocked out, caught in a checkmate, or uses up their twelve minutes of chess time.

Granted, boxing and chess have nothing in common, and a hybrid of the two sounds inane and like it would mix together as well as two bricks in a blender.  Nevertheless, the lovechild of the two completely unrelated activities has garnered a following to be reckoned with and are a testament to the absolute weirdness that humans are capable of. So if you’ve had a long day, head home, get out the chess board, and take a few swings at your friends to let out your stress. Just don’t call up Mike Tyson for a match or you’ll be walking home a little more deaf than when you came.

~Tinct