| BERLIN (AP) – Nikolay Sazhin almost knocked out his opponent with a blow to the chin in the second round. But he had to take the queen to win the match.In front of 1,000 cheering fans one recent Saturday night, Sazhin moved his bishop to go in for the kill and won the world championship of chess boxing, a weird hybrid sport that combines as many as five rounds of pugilism with a game of chess.
The combatants switch back and forth between boxing and chess—repeatedly putting their gloves on and taking them off, so that they can move the pieces around the board without clumsily knocking them over—in a sort of brains-and-brawn biathlon.
“It’s the No. 1 thinking game and the No. 1 fighting game,” said Iepe Rubingh, the sport’s 32-year-old founder.
Rubingh’s inspiration was “Cold Equator,” a 1992 French comic book in which two heavyweight boxers beat each other’s brains out for 12 rounds and then play a 45-hour game of chess.
“That’s not functional. So I thought about how it could work,” Rubingh said.
Germany has emerged as a major boxing center, attracting top talent from Eastern Europe. Most of the world’s top heavyweight fighters are natives of Russia and Ukraine, and many train in Hamburg.
Rubingh knows he won’t be recruiting either boxers or chess players at the top of their game, but he believes there is a deep reservoir of talent among amateur and lower-ranked pro fighters with sharp, tactical minds.
One of his first prospects was Frank Stoldt, a 37-year-old Berlin riot policeman and amateur kickboxer. Stoldt was also an obsessive chess player who often lost himself in late-night online matches.
It was long after midnight in a Berlin warehouse when Sazhin and Stoldt entered the ring and sat down at the chessboard.
Stoldt moved quickly to establish a defensive perimeter of pawns, while Sazhin staggered his diagonally. Switching to boxing, Sazhin attacked Stoldt with a relentless series of body blows that left the German exhausted.
Back at the chessboard, Stoldt looked distracted, and he left his queen vulnerable as he scurried to protect an exposed bishop. Sazhin pounced, forcing Stoldt to concede the match. |
