The art of chessboxing - where brains can knock out brawn

Heavyweight thinkers: chessboxing has become the world’s fastest growing hybrid sport
10 April 2012

Two players stare one another out over a chequered board. Their minds are locked in concentration. Their tiny armies are poised.

White moves his king's pawn to e4. Black manoeuvres his knight to f6.

White backs up his pawn with d3. Not so fast, thinks Black and smacks White with a left hook! Gadzooks, thinks White and connects with Black's nose - but Black's back with a sharp jab! Bish bash bosh and it's back to the board.

Welcome to the punishing world of chessboxing, which - despite its evident insanity - has become the world's fastest growing hybrid sport.

A Dutch artist named Iepe Rubingh first thought to combine the disciplines as a sort of joke in an Amsterdam art gallery in 2003.

He was subsequently crowned heavyweight champion of the world in the first official contest in Berlin (there was only one challenger) but since that prank, chessboxing organisations have sprung up as far afield as Siberia. Now London is poised to host its largest event.

In the Boston Dome in Tufnell Park on Friday night, Italy's Gianluca "Il Dottore" Sirci will challenge our very own Andy "The Rock" Costello for the European heavyweight crown.

As a warm-up, two heavyweights will enter the ring: undercard Hubert Van Melick of Holland and "Mexican mystery man" Hector Gomez.

These men will play alternate rounds of chess and boxing - beginning with four minutes of chess, followed by two minutes of boxing, playing until a victor is decided either by checkmate or by knock-out. Simple!

"It's going to be a lot of fun," says organiser Tim Woolgar, who is also the heavyweight champion of the UK. "We've got people coming from all over Europe."

Woolgar first encountered chessboxing in Berlin - he was "knocked out" by it. Since then he has become an evangelist for the sport, which now has "a couple of hundred" adherents in the UK.

He has even received charity funding to open a chessboxing club for the children of the Ring Cross estate in Islington.

"They absolutely love it. One kid put it quite well: 'Chessboxing makes you feel brave'."

He stresses the sport is first and foremost "a laugh", yet "incredibly demanding when it comes to the highest level of competition".

Its enthusiasts seem rather obsessive about meeting those demands: "Through chessboxing training we embrace a system of continual personal development without limitations," explains the London chessboxing website, rather terrifyingly.

"By playing chess, you are honing your innate capacity to think rationally, logically and strategically," explains Woolgar.

"We've all been in stressful situations where our mind goes blank and we can't think of what you want to do. Chessboxing enables you to respond in an efficient way even under duress."

I suppose when your rook and queen are forked and your head is spinning from a particularly brutal uppercut, it takes a special kind of inspiration to conjure a winning gambit.

Is there a particular quality, I wonder, that Woolgar looks for in a rookie?

He laughs. "I would just look for someone who's crazy enough to want to do it!"

Chessboxing is at the Boston Dome on the first floor of the Boston Arms, N19 on Friday.

Information: www.londonchessboxing.com/

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