Chess競技・連盟管理

Chess boxing, or chessboxing, is a hybrid sport that combines chess and boxing. Two combatants play alternating rounds of blitz chess and boxing 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 on a platform being lifted in and out of the ring from the ceiling for each round.

The governing bodies of chess boxing are the World Chess Boxing Association and the World Chess Boxing Organisation.

Chess boxing 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. Chess boxing is particularly popular in the United Kingdom, India, Finland, France, and Russia.

Alan Turing invented an earlier hybrid chess sport, referred to as "round-the-house chess", where one player makes a chess move, then that player runs around the house, and the other player must make a chess move before the first player returns.

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 chess boxing was first coined in the 1979 kung fu film The Mystery of Chess Boxing 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 chess boxing into popular consciousness for the first time in 1993, when they released the song "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'".

The first chess boxing event was put on by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh. 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, that portrays a chess boxing 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 to be impractical, Rubingh developed the idea further until it turned into the competitive sport that chess boxing is today, with alternating rounds of chess and boxing and a detailed set of rules and regulations.

The first chess boxing 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.

By 2012, Rubingh in Berlin and Tim Woolgar in London had become the two shining lights of the chess boxing scene. Rubingh's events tended to have a more serious tone, while Woolgar's brought a party atmosphere and larger crowds. These two champions of the new sport were unable to agree on forming a unified style, which eventually left the sport with two governing bodies: the World Chess Boxing Association (WCBA) and the WCBO. This period in chess boxing history was immortalised in the film By Rook or Left Hook – The Story of Chessboxing.

The first European Chess Boxing Championship took place in Berlin on 1 October 2005. Present-day chess boxing commentator Andreas Dilschneider was defeated by Tihomir Dovramadjiev (FIDE Master) when he resigned in the ninth round of chess, crowning the latter by being the first European Chess Boxing Champion. A video report by German television channel RBB presented the event in detail. In 2006, more than 800 spectators filled the Gloria Theatre in Cologne for the world championship qualification fight between Zoran Mijatovic and Frank Stoldt. The 36-year-old Frank Stoldt, who was a former UN peacekeeper in Kosovo and Afghanistan, won when his opponent resigned in chess in the seventh round. After qualifying to fight for the title in 2006, Frank Stoldt went up against American David Depto in November 2007 in Berlin to fight for the first world championship title in the light heavyweight division. More than 800 tickets were sold for the event at the Tape Club in Berlin, making it the biggest chess boxing title fight to that date. Frank Stoldt defeated Depto in the seventh round and thereby cemented Berlin's status as the leading city in the chess boxing world and becoming the first German world champion.

Chess boxing first received credit from the International Chess Federation FIDE, in April 2008; its president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, took part in a chess boxing demo fight in Elista. In 2008, chess boxing clubs were founded in London and Krasnoyarsk. Created in 2009, the Los Angeles Chessboxing Club was the first of its kind in the United States and was directly followed by the New York Chessboxing Club in 2010. The Boxer in Munich also opened in 2010 and offers chess boxing training. In addition to the WCBO's initially European and later world championships taking place, the scene at the London Chessboxing Club grew as well. In 2011, the first international club matchup took place, with Berlin and London in the ring.

In 2011, the WCBO and with it, the global chess boxing community, made the biggest leap forward in its development to date with the foundation of the Chessboxing Organisation of India and its expansion in Asia, including Chessboxing China and the Chessboxing Organisation of Iran, which was founded in 2012. Furthermore, the third chess boxing organization in the United States, USA Chessboxing, was founded in 2011 and the European movement was being reinforced by the foundation of the Italian Chessboxing Federation in 2012. In addition to the WCBO becoming a registered association under German law in 2014, the Chess Boxing Global Marketing CBGM GmbH – called Chess Boxing Global (CBG) – was founded; it as of May 2013 is responsible for organizing all professional chess boxing fights worldwide and above all, for the organization of the Chess Boxing World Championships.