What is chess boxing? And a look into its early years!
Chess boxing, or chessboxing, is a hybrid sport that combines two traditional disciplines: chess and boxing. Two combatants play alternating blitz chess and boxing rounds until one wins by checkmate or knockout. It is also possible to win by time penalty as in normal chess, and by boxing decision if there is a draw in the chess round. Typically, events are held in a standard boxing ring using standard amateur boxing equipment and rules. The chess round is also played in the ring with the table, board, and seating being moved in and out of the ring for each round. The governing bodies of chessboxing are the World Chessboxing Association and the World Chess Boxing Organisation. Chessboxing was invented by French comic book artist Enki Bilal and adapted by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh as an art performance and has subsequently grown into a competitive sport. Chessboxing is particularly popular in the United Kingdom, India, Finland, and Russia. An earlier version of combining chess and boxing took 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. The concept of chessboxing was first coined in the 1979 kung fu film Mystery of Chessboxing made by Joseph Kuo, where it referred to the Chinese variant of chess, xiangqi. In homage to the film of the same name, the band Wu-Tang Clan brought chessboxing into popular consciousness for the first time in 1993, when they released the song "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'". Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh put on the first chessboxing event. 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, which 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 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. 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 Organization (WCBO) that had been 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 eleventh round, going down in the history books as the first-ever World Chess Boxing Champion.
