New sport combines boxing and chess
11:41 AM CDT on Monday, July 21, 2008
The Associated Press
BERLIN — Nikolay Sazhin almost knocked out his opponent with a blow to the chin in the second round. But he had to take the queen to win the match.
In front of 1,000 cheering fans one recent Saturday night, Sazhin moved his bishop to go in for the kill and won the world championship of chess boxing, a weird hybrid sport that combines as many as five rounds of pugilism with a game of chess.
The combatants switch back and forth between boxing and chess — repeatedly putting their gloves on and taking them off, so that they can move the pieces around the board without clumsily knocking them over — in a sort of brains-and-brawn biathlon.
“It’s the No. 1 thinking game and the No. 1 fighting game,” said Iepe Rubingh, the sport’s 32-year-old founder.
Rubingh’s inspiration was “Cold Equator,” a 1992 French comic book in which two heavyweight boxers beat each other’s brains out for 12 rounds and then play a 45-hour game of chess.
“That’s not functional. So I thought about how it could work,” Rubingh said.
In his version, a chessboard is brought into the ring on a table and the combatants play four minutes, after which the board is wheeled off very carefully so that the pieces don’t fall over. Then the fighters put on the gloves and trade punches for a round, after which the board is brought back. The pattern is repeated over and over. The chess game can last up to 24 minutes.
If you knock your opponent out, the chess is over, too, and you win the match. If you beat your opponent at chess, then the boxing is over, and you are the victor. In the case of a draw at the chessboard, the boxer with more points in the ring is declared the winner.
Rubingh uses an electronic chessboard that lets spectators watch the action projected onto a pair of large ringside screens.
In 2003, some 800 people turned out in Amsterdam to watch an exhibition match between Rubingh and a friend. “It was a catastrophe. I lost my queen in the second round of chess,” he said.
But the loss didn’t stop him from pursuing his dream.
The Dutchman returned to Berlin — where he has lived for a decade — and set out to find tough fighters who could also play a good game of chess.
Germany has emerged as a major boxing center, attracting top talent from Eastern Europe. Most of the world’s top heavyweight fighters are natives of Russia and Ukraine, and many train in Hamburg.
Rubingh knows he won’t be recruiting either boxers or chess players at the top of their game, but he believes there is a deep reservoir of talent among amateur and lower-ranked pro fighters with sharp, tactical minds.
One of his first prospects was Frank Stoldt, a 37-year-old Berlin riot policeman and amateur kickboxer. Stoldt was also an obsessive chess player who often lost himself in late-night online matches.
Here is the full article.
This is a lot more exciting than chess.
Coincidentially, today I saw Sahzin’s opponent Stoldt in a german talk show (repeated from July 11th). Despite losing the fight, he seems still quite enthusiastic about chess boxing, which he explained in detail.
I don’t think “normal” chess will appear in such programs, maybe with the exception of the World Championship players. Anand already was in another german talk show, recently.
Stupid game
what next?
a game where opponents spray each other with mace and then a game of scrabble?
if chess is so boring for some people,
go watch a football game.
why bring everything down to the lowest
common denominator. that’s so american!
“what next?
a game where opponents spray each other with mace and then a game of scrabble?”
No, better. Each player sprays each other with excrement and then tries to move chess pieces with their butt cheeks. This is the Bulgarian method.
That’s actually not “american”, it’s rather the attempt to bring brain and muscles together. In my opinion to it is rather bullshit tough.
And anyway the original idea comes from a FRENCH graphic novel classic (but there I like the idea, not in reality…).
So from what I know the original idea of chess-boxing comes from the Science-Fiction Arthouse-Comic-Trilogy “Nikopol” by Enki Bilal (and, more precisely, from the third tome, “Cold Equator”. In this tome Nikopol is in some futuristic big city and is the champion of chess-boxing.
It was made in the 80s and is one of the big classics of french-belgian Comics. I strongly reccomend it to anybody who likes philosophical and a bit weird arthouse comics.
Ridley Scott is by the way said to have been visually influenced by drawings of Enki Bilal for the design of “Blade Runner” (ironically enough some ignorant critics later blamed Bilal that the visual design of his recent film “Immortal”, which is based on the first two tomes of “Nikopol” (I haven’t seen it, so I can’t say if it’s as genius as the comic), was a copy of Blade Runner and the Fifth Element, not being aware that the film is based on his comic older than those films and that so it’s rather Enki Bilal who influenced them…).
It’s more difficult for competitors to cheat with a machine at this version, but not impossible.
🙂
We should have a chess boxing match between Anand and Kramnik!!