Play 4 minutes of chess. Box a round. Rinse. Repeat.
If someone wins the chess game, they win the match. If someone is knocked out, they lose the match. If the chess game isn’t completed and both are still on their feet at the end, the victory goes to whoever is ahead on points in the boxing match.
It reads from the decription as if a couple of people were pounded out of their ability to focus on the chess, which I guess is no big sutprise.
I have to admit, if this was held locally, I’d go see it.
Well it’s about time. I always felt chess and boxing were a perfect match, like peanut butter and jalepeno peppers. Hopefully this will open the doors for a new breed of cross-discipline competition - I eagerly await the day I can watch an exciting Dungeons & Dragons / Elimidate hybrid championship.
Chess is even worse as a spectator sport than you’d expect. I guess if you have a couple huge guys huffing and puffing and bleeding all over the place, it’d be more exciting, but it still would be slow.
Regardless, very cool.
Dammit, I’m disappointed. I had a picture in my mind of a huge chessboard with actual human boxers representing each of the chessmen, and they would have to beat the shit out of each other.
This is funny… because a guy I know always claimed he should be the “Combined Chess/Boxing World Champion” – because, he claimed, he could box the snot out of the World Champion Chess player, and could easily beat the World Heavyweight Champ at chess…
There used to be, and may well still be, a chess tournament in a London pub where 8 games of 10-minutes per player chess were played. In between games was a 10 minute break. Each player had to drink a pint during each game, and if they won they had to drink a pint in the gap in between games. So to go 8-0, one would have to drink 15 pints.
I can’t help but imagine that a few of those matches decended to chess boxing.
Hmm… Wikipedia gives two different formulae for converting ECF gradings[sup]*[/sup] to Elo, on either of which Lennox would beat me though not by much. I’m guessing glee (who’s considerably better than me) could handle Lennox though.
[sup]*[/sup]At the last count I was ECF graded about 125, but I’ve never been Elo-rated.
Drs. Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko are supposedly no slouches, either. Vitali is buddies with former world champion Vladimir Kramnik and plays with him regulalry, and he once lost a respectable game to Deep Fritz.
I could see getting into chess boxing, if such a thing were anywhere near here. My boxing is decent, but my chess would need some serious brushing up. When I was a kid I studied and played all the time, when I was in Prague I played a lot because everyone did, but not so much lately. I rented Chessmaster for my PS2 a few years ago, all the various difficulty levels were given little avatars and personalities, a grandmaster at the hardest level, then professors, businesspersons, students, an so on in the middle, down to children, etc. I started in the middle, lost, worked my way down, lost, until I was on the easiest level. The character was a monkey who allegedly moved the pieces around almost at random.
