It is as odd as it sounds. Chessboxing, a new sporting craze taking over the ringsides of Europe, is the strangest mix of competitions. Kath Stathers steps into the ring to uncover just what is going on.

Chessboxing really does need an explanation. Its chess with boxing but the two words don’t belong in the same sentence, it seems wrong. What this means is the strangest evening of sporting competition ever—eleven rounds, six chess, five boxing and you win with a checkmate or a knockout.

This isn’t some elaborate hoax to fathom out gullibility levels either, it’s a bona fide sport with its own gym in Germany and a European champion from Bulgaria.

The sport is the creation of Lepe Rubingh, a Dutch concept artist who has played chess forever and boxed for several years. As he played chess one evening, in 2002 with a friend and fellow boxer Luis, they started chatting about boxing and Lepe (it’s pronounced Eeper) remembered a comic book he used to love, by Yugoslavian artist Enki Bilal. It had featured a tournament of 12 rounds of boxing followed by a five-hour chess game. The chessboxing idea was born, and it fitted neatly with the concept artist’s notions of challenging society’s pigeon-holed categories.

“It started more as art,” says Lepe, in tones of someone who has had to explain this many time before. “Because I wanted to mix the two worlds. Society tends to be so one dimensional, so specified. But in the ancient Olympics there were always podiums, and athletes gave speeches too. Now sport is just sport, there’s no cultural element.”

Lepe tweaked the comic-book’s format, “I wanted it to be as much about a healthy mind as a healthy body,” he says, “I wanted players to be able to win in either sport.” By September 2003 he had it all worked out and “Lepe the Joker” took on “Luis the Lawyer” in a demo fight at Platoon, a Berlin art gallery.

The format he came up with is six chess rounds of four minutes, interspersed by five boxing rounds of two minutes each. There’s a minute between each round to take the gloves off (they can get in the way a bit in chess) and to wipe down sweaty brows. And here lies the key to being a successful chessboxer, the moving between the two sports. “The problem’s not a high pulse,” says heavyweight chessboxer from Berlin, Andrea Dilschneider. “The problem’s high adrenalin. You have to train yourself not to overestimate your position in chess.”

Each player has twelve minutes on the clock for their chess game and if they run out of time their opponent wins the match. The other ways to win are checkmate and a knockout.

And, if at the end of the 11 rounds no-one’s been knocked out and the chess game hasn’t ended, then the winner is decided on points from the boxing rounds.

Two months after that first match, Lepe and Luis fought again, this time in Amsterdam, Lepe’s other home, for the world middleweight chessboxing title. A competition that no-one else entered, as no-one else was yet practising the sport. They went the full 11 rounds, and Rubingh won on points. “I still have the title now,” he says, two and a half years later, “but only because I was first.

I’ll have to defend the title soon and I think it will be my last fight. I’m 32 now, the competition is younger and better and has been training harder.” This second fight attracted media coverage from all over the world. Lepe and his fellow chessboxers set up a website to cope with the interest and received enquiries from Boston to Japan.

It was a good enough response for Lepe to feel justified in founding the World Chess Boxing Organisation (WCBO) and to set up a dedicated chessboxing gym in Berlin (now franchised to Bulgaria, too). It has up to 22 members and they meet twice a week. Training is very structured with an hour spent on chess and an hour on boxing and two trainers for each discipline.

Training exercises are orientated towards the combining of both sports, such as making a move in chess, then giving your all to a punch bag for 15 seconds or playing a three-minute round of chess followed by a 400 metre run. “You have to be physically very fit,” says heavyweight Andrea, “but you also have to be able to switch from very fast exercise to very slow concentration.”

It’s all about the control of aggression. The WCBO’s motto is “Fighting is done in the ring and wars are waged on the board.”

The members who come to the gym are management consultants, policemen, actors of both sexes. Some are there to keep in shape, others for the fights, but all of them take their sport seriously. “Most people come from boxing and are good amateur chess players,” says Andrea. “But two or three are from chess clubs who’ve done a bit of both, and some are neither, they just heard about it and got interested.”

He believes there’s more symbiosis between the sports than you might initially realize. “In both sports you have two opponents. You give and you take. You have to concentrate on what you want to reach and your moves are influenced by what your partner does. You can’t just react, you have to read your opponent.”

Suddenly putting the two sports together doesn’t seem so strange. “It worked better than I thought it would,” Lepe admits. Even the crowds who go to the games seem to like it. Sharing in the highs and lows of adrenalin that the competitors feel.

When the WCBO staged the European Heavyweight Championship in September last year, it received huge publicity in Germany and beyond. Stephen Moss, the chess correspondent heard about it, and having been in the ring once before, he decided to try the sport out himself. “It’s a good discipline,” he says. “But I don’t think I’ll be doing it again. I don’t mind losing at chess, but I do object to being bopped on the nose.”

What started out as word of mouth in the UK soon developed into heavyweight interest. “Brits seem to be amazed by the idea, they really, really like it,” says Andrea. “I think it appeals to their slightly eccentric nature.”

This autumn, the sport might even make its British TV debut—although Lepe’s not dropping his guard on the details. He’ll certainly be hoping that Lennox Lewis is watching, though. The former heavyweight champion is also a talented chess player, as is his former rival, Vitali Klitschko. It’s Lepe’s dream match. “It would be as big as the Rumble in the Jungle,” he says. “We’ll offer them $15million.” It’s a thought, but possibly not one that the retired Lewis is sharing.

For younger competitors starting out in the sport now, though, does the WCBO envisage this kind of prize money? “I don’t know,” says Andrea. “The quality is rising and the interest is spreading, but it may never be a mass-media sport.” All the same, for something that started out as an art show it seems to have made its mark on the sporting world.

As Andrea likes to think, “it’s the biathlon of the 21st century!”