Arthur Cravan was a boxer-poet who defied every stereotype and convention. When he stepped out of the ring, he dedicated himself to bohemian life, literature, and lyric poetry, honoring his uncle Oscar Wilde. The classic tango even celebrates that elegant boxer who threw crosses with the intelligence of his physical ability. But nothing had prepared us for a sport that combines two worlds as routinely separate as boxing and chess.
Chess Boxing: Boxing + Chess
In red shorts, with his chest tattoos exposed, he is dazzled by the ring lights. The audience moves frantically in their seats, but it is as if someone hit Mute on the scene. In another uncomfortable silence, his opponent looks down, as if searching his feet for the strategy of the next blow. And he finds it. He moves a piece on the board, and a right cross wakes him from the commotion, almost putting him back to sleep. As he regains balance and stands offensively, ready to counterattack, he raises his fists and lowers his gaze. That's when he spots his opponent's mistake: the bishop has a clear path to the queen. With a shrewd and quick move, the blow is more precise than an uppercut to the jaw.
Chess boxing is the discipline that can make scenes like this real, where the poetically savage meeting of fists between two athletes joins the intellectual measurement involved in a chess game. A sporting and intellectual Frankenstein that unites the unthinkable and turns it into sport and spectacle.
Who Invented Chess Boxing?
Chess boxing was created in 1992 by the French artist Enki Bilal while he was drawing a comic book called Froid Équateur. The real-life sport only appeared in 2003 with an official tournament held in Berlin, Germany. Needless to say, boxing popularly has a performer who implies a priori readings about their intellectual capabilities. But let the prejudice about the performer not confuse us. Both boxing and chess require intelligence, and it is here that they have converged to establish a possible concept in this era of remix, of mixtures, of hybrids, and all those positive confluences for the reformulation of the known; sometimes as art, sometimes as philosophy, and sometimes as a social activity.
The Rules of Chess Boxing
Chess boxing has very precise rules that must be followed to the letter. First, the match consists of 11 rounds, and the chessboxers (to give them a name) must alternate between boxing and playing chess. Each boxing round lasts 3 minutes, and the chess rounds last 4. The match begins with a chess round followed by a boxing round. There is a one-minute pause between rounds, in which competitors can calm down and even change clothes.
For chess, the rules of rapid chess are used, and a single competitor has a total of twelve minutes to move their pieces spread across the entire fight. The chess player's time is measured using an official chess clock. The impressive thing is that the sport requires you to be fit in both disciplines, because the fight is won by knockout or by checkmate. However, there are never draws, because if neither reaches checkmate nor knocks out the other physically, the bout is decided by points obtained during the fight, as in conventional boxing.
The intensity of the fights is not tempered by the apparent intellect of someone who can also sit at a chessboard. The fights are tough, and the proposal is to go all out, but those who participate in the activity comment on how the combined discipline shapes them in the difficult art of thinking in action.
World Chess Boxing Association
One of the most determined contenders for victory is Tim Woolgar, a 40-year-old amateur boxer who presides over the World Chess Boxing Association, and he explains that the real difficulty lies in dealing with physical risk while maintaining perfect mental balance to avoid mistakes. This happens more often in boxing, but the adrenaline drop that chess causes is quite complex, because the excitement after physical play is very likely to lead them to make mistakes. Those four minutes to play chess never become rest, but rather another discipline to pay attention to, because if you make a gross mistake in chess and put your king at risk, your hooks and jabs to the jaw will have no value.
The advantage, we could say, is on the side of those who have physical strength on their side and know how to box, because although it is possible to win chess games in a few moves, these may not happen in the first 4 minutes. Of course, none of the participants ignores the basics and rules of chess, even if some are experts and others are just taking their first steps to fight on both fronts in the ring. Specialization in one discipline or the other has led many boxers to have chess coaches, and the same goes for chess players who are more daring. Thus, for some years now, official tournaments have required participants to be class A chess players, demonstrable through the ELO rating (1900-2000 approx). One of the strongest participants in Chess Boxing has been Arik Braun, ranked as a Grandmaster by FIDE with an ELO of 2556.
As if it were a kind of Fight Club less illegal, less bloody, and less philosophically significant, Chess Boxing venues receive fighters from all over the world, whose backgrounds are quite eclectic, although many come from middle classes with professional activities. Among those who participate in the tournaments, and according to Tim Woolgar in the report, we can find carpenters and nuclear physicists, as well as quite a few bank employees and a huge number of former boxers or people trained in mixed martial arts. “It tends to attract people who are original thinkers,” Woolgar continues. “They tend to be independent spirits with the ability to take on a challenge that other people would fear. You have to have courage to be a chess boxer, because you are being a bit of a pioneer.”
