Chessboxing is a thing
Will our local investment bankers bring this to Cairo? Chessboxing has started growing in popularity among London investment bankers in the past five year. The sport is a hybrid between boxing and chess where “participants alternate four-minute rounds on the board and three-minutes in the ring until someone takes a knock-out blow on the canvas, or gets checkmated. If the game of chess ends with a tie, it is settled with the points earned in the boxing rounds. If the boxing fight ends with a tie, the player who had black on the chessboard wins.” The Financial Times’ Emma Jacobs says chessboxing is an evolution of “white-collar boxing” that first gained popularity among Wall Street professionals in the 1990s and spread to the City, but it has the added appeal of showing “you are mentally as well as physically agile.” Sounds odd? Here are the highlights of the World Chess Boxing Championships from Germany in 2008 (part one, runtime 10:07) and (part two, runtime 06:16).