John North Editor & Publisher

I thought I had seen — and heard — everything until I did a bob and weave upon reading about a new hybrid sport that combines boxing and 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,” Lepe Rubingh, the sport’s 32-year-old founder, recently told the press in Berlin, Germany. The sport has been organized since 2003 and has become increasingly popular since then.

Rubingh claims to have been inspired by “Cold Equator,” a 1992 French comic book in which two heavyweight boxers beat each others’ 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 claimed.

In his style of the game, a chessboard is brought into the ring on a table and the combatants play four minutes, after which the board is wheeled off very carefully, so that the pieces don’t fall over. Then the fighters put on the gloves and trade punches for a round, after which the board is brought back. The pattern is repeated over and over. The chess game can last up to 24 minutes.

If you knock your opponent out, the chess is over, too, and you win the match. If you beat your opponent at chess, then the boxing is over, and you are the victor.

In the case of a draw at the chessboard, the boxer with more points in the ring is declared as the winner.
Rubingh uses an electronic chessboard that lets spectators watch the action projected onto a pair of large ringside screens.

Matches in his new sport have been known to attract as many as 800 people in cities as large as Amsterdam.

In my opinion, chess boxing, by requiring an intense combination of skills  — top mental and physical powers — seems to spoil the sanctity of two demanding and time-honored activities.

And yet, I must admit that in all its madness, maybe it will produce the quintessential Renaissance Man.
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John North, publisher and editor of the Daily Planet, may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it