Chess Boxing

Chess boxing, or chessboxing, is a hybrid fighting sport that combines two traditional sports, chess and boxing. The competitors fight in alternating rounds of chess and boxing. Chessboxing was invented by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh. What was initially only thought to be an art performance quickly turned into a fully developed competitive sport. Chessboxing is particularly popular in Germany, Great Britain, India and Russia.

Rubingh’s idea to create a new sport fusing the two disciplines, chess and boxing, originates from the 1992 comic Froid Équateur—written by French comic book artist Enki Bilal (born Enes Bilalović)—that portrays a chessboxing world championship. In the comic book version however, the opponents fight an entire boxing match before they face each other in a game of chess. Finding this to be impractical, Rubingh developed the idea further until it turned into the competitive sport that chessboxing is today with alternating rounds of chess and boxing and a detailed set of rules and regulations. An earlier version of combining chess and boxing was said to have taken place in a boxing club outside London in the late 1970s. The Robinson brothers were in the habit of playing a round of chess against one another after a training session at their boxing club. However, no direct correlation can be made between the Robinson brothers’ chess playing and chessboxing. The same goes for the Kung-Fu movie Mystery of Chessboxing (1979) as well as the Wu-Tang Clan's song "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'" (1993).

The first chessboxing competition took place in Berlin in 2003. That same year, the first world championship fight was held in Amsterdam in cooperation with the Dutch Boxing Association as well as the Dutch Chess Federation and under the auspices of the World Chess Boxing Organisation (WCBO) that was founded in Berlin shortly before. Dutch middleweight fighters Iepe Rubingh and Jean Louis Veenstra faced each other in the ring. After his opponent exceeded the chess time limit, Rubingh won the fight in the 11th round going down in the history books as the first ever World Chess Boxing Champion. The same goes for the Chess Boxing Club Berlin, created in the following year (2004), that is the first of its kind making Berlin the birthplace of chessboxing.

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