Ledger Pop Journal - Celebrity News & Sports

Berlin is home to the world's biggest chess boxing club with some 40 members. What is chess boxing? Well first, there are ring girls. A match between two opponents consists of up to eleven alternating rounds of boxing and chess sessions, starting with a four-minute chess round followed by two minutes of boxing. Wait, what?

Bizarre Chess Boxing, Ring Girls Violence and Brains

That's right, for a bit the two combatants try to think and make strategic moves around the chess board and then they stand up with boxing gloves and all and try to knock each other senseless. It sounds a bit strange but at least there is action and to succeed players must be both skilled chess players and skilled boxers.


The form of chess played is speed chess in which each competitor has a total of twelve minutes for the whole game. Competitors may win by knockout, checkmate, a judge's decision or if their opponent's twelve minutes of chess time elapses. See a video of a match here.

According to an online source, the concept of combining boxing and chess was envisioned in 1992 by cartoonist Enki Bilal, and a match of chess boxing was a major plot point of his graphic novel Froid Équateur.