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Board games

Chessboxing

Do you find chess a little staid? Do you find boxing somewhat brutish? Then clearly what you need is chessboxing, in which contestants altenate 4-minute rounds of chess with 2-minute boxing rounds.

The contest is decided by: checkmate (chess round), exceeding the time limit (chess round), retirement of an opponent (chess or boxing round), KO (boxing round), or referee decision (boxing round). If the chess game ends in a stalement, the opponent with the higher score in boxing wins. If there is an equal score, the opponent with the black pieces wins.

“Pin my bishop, would you? Take that!” *kapow*

It actually sounds like it might be quite appealing as a spectacle, even if you’re not fond of either component alone. Would Kramnik have beaten Kasparov if fisticuffs had been involved? I reckon Garry could be quite handy in a punchup. And what about Deep Blue? — I guess it would have to be accompanied by a boxing robot.

14 replies on “Chessboxing”

And for a bonus, what other seemingly-unrelated pastimes might fruitfully be combined with pleasing effect?

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Looks interesting, thanks

BTW: Your post looked so much like Spam, I nearly deleted it…

Lennox Lewis would seem to be an easy favourite here; with sufficient boxing skill then you don’t need to have sufficient chess ability to win – though rumour has it that Lennox knows what he’s doing on the 64 squares – merely sufficient chess ability to avoid being checkmated. While the reverse is also true for people with sufficient chess ability, my gut feeling is that it’s rather easier to take artificially slow moves throughout the chess rounds than it is to float like a butterfly and keep out of the range of the punches of the boxing rounds.

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