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Competitors must be adroit in both
chess and boxing, so there is no room
for a professional boxer who is going
to rely on beating his opponent to pulp
before he can move knight to D5. To
enter the sport, competitors must have
a Class A level as a chess player. One
of the highest profile chess-boxers,
Tihomir Atanassov Dovramadjiev, has
a rating of over 2300 and has won
many chess championships.
The sport was brought into the
publi
c arena by Dutch artist Iepe
Rubingh in 2003. The roots of the sport
are, unsurprisingly, to be found in a
futuristic comic book by Yugoslavian
artist Enki Bilal, which features a 12
round boxing match followed by a five-
hour chess match.
Rubingh found the sheer epic scale of
the original concept hard to replicate,
and tweaked the system to the one
used today. While sport is the focus of
his vision, he claims that it also makes
an artistic point.
“Chess boxing breaks certain rules,”
explains the 31-year-old Rubingh. “We
tend to divide everything into different
worlds, but in my opinion worlds are
much more connected than people
see them at first. Chess boxing breaks
through this habit.”
Placing himself at the centre of the sport,
he took the name Iepe the Joker and
faced off again Luis the Lawyer in the
first ever chess-boxing middle weight
championship. Rubingh consequently
won that match, though it was a close
run thing.
“I had a pretty terrible position on the
board so in the last round I tried to
knock him out,” he recalls. “He only just
managed to stay on his feet. The bell
went and he put his hands up in the air
but he couldn’t find his corner. He was
really dizzy but we still had to play the
final round of chess. There was a clear
win for him, but he just couldn’t figure
out the right moves.”
Since those humble beginnings, the
sport has continued to attract spectators
and participants. Tournaments are
held regularly, though according to
Tom Woolgar – who brought the sport
to Britain in 2008 - the audiences can
have varying degrees of interest.
“Some people look away during the
boxing, and some people look away
during the chess, depending on what
your background is, I suppose,” Mr
Woolgar said.
Chess-boxing’s growing popularity in
many ways reflects changing views on
what it is to be a man.
The divide between pastimes that
require the grey matter to flare and
those that are about testosterone-
fueled aggression are being blurred.
As we learn more about how the brain
is functioning during sport, we see
that instinct is only part of the picture.
Decisions are being made at turbo-fast
speeds by men traditionally seen as
mouth-breathing morons.
Chess-boxing
is
one
natural
progression as we come to see the
blurring of the intellectual and the
physical.
touchline
21
Spotlight on Sport