Chessboxing — where pawn meets brawn

LONDON — Andreas Dilschneider was still thinking about his opening moves on the chessboard when his opponent rushed up to him and punched him. Several times.

Dilschneider didn't complain. It was all perfectly legitimate. He threw a few punches of his own. When he got back to the chessboard, he was laboring and the adrenaline was pumping. He tried to keep calm and avoid hasty moves. Four minutes later, it was back into the boxing ring again.

Welcome to chessboxing, a sport that prides itself on its incongruous mix of muscle and mind. Think jab with your right, counter with your queen.

The rules are simple: six rounds of speed chess interlaced with five three-minute rounds in the ring. Each competitor has 12 minutes in total on the chess timer. Victory is by knockout, checkmate or resignation, or failing any of those, by a points-based scoring system.

If it sounds surreal, to a certain extent it is. But chessboxing is growing in popularity, particularly in Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia.

And this weekend, an American will compete in the World Championship Final for the first time when David Depto, a pharmaceutical salesman from San Francisco, steps into the ring to take on Frank "Anti-Terror" Stoldt, a German, in an arena packed with perhaps 1,200 devotees.

Depto, who has boxed for 12 years and played chess since he was 6, says it's not a sport for someone strong in one discipline and weak in the other.

"If you are weak at chess you will get checkmated quickly, and if you are weak at boxing you will get knocked out quickly," he says.

The concept was the brainchild of Iepe Rubingh, a Dutch artist who took the idea from a comic, Froid Equateur. The first bouts, staged five years ago, were more performance art than sport, but the oxymoronic nature of the contest has caught on.

Stephen Moss, a British journalist and chess enthusiast who endured one chessboxing bout, says the combination of sports is not so incongruous.

"There is a macho-ness about chess that people don't realize," he says. "The same sorts of emotions are driving those who do both. Both are battles to the death — kill or be killed — and it could all change in the space of two or three moves."