They throw a mean “check” right hook.
It’s April 18th And Max Medley conducts an amateur sparring session at the inaugural Interclub Chess Boxing event at the iconic Gleason’s Boxing Gym in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
As is often the case with this paradoxical pursuit, the scrimmage became a contest of brains and brawn.
As an excellent chess player, the 26-year-old architect knew that if he could survive a round of boxing, he would excel at elements of the strategy game.
However, his opponent, a more skilled fighter, “came out swinging.”
“You don’t have to win at boxing…you just have to play better chess than you,” Medley recalled to the Post. “So the whole time I’m boxing, I’m just thinking about getting through this situation to win at chess.”
Thankfully, my brain won that day. Medley won by checkmate, even though he had, in his words, “lost it.”
“It was very tough,” the relieved athlete recalled, only to show up to his white-collar job the next day with bruises that looked straight out of the movie “Fight Club.”
However, this was not an officially sanctioned tournament match for prize money or a belt, but rather a duel held purely for fun and challenge.
Medley is one of a growing number of popular professionals embracing a hybrid pastime that combines speed chess and live boxing sparring, and requires no experience with either.
The hour-and-a-half class, which combines “high-intensity cardio, technical ring work, and strategic chess training,” is held every Sunday morning at Gleason’s in partnership with Chess Boxing New York City, and costs $40 for drop-ins, $20 for Gleason’s members, and $60 for unlimited.
As the name suggests, the contest consists of 11 alternating rounds of chess (6 rounds) and boxing (5 rounds), each lasting 3 minutes.
Once the time is up, the contestant pauses the match, dons boxing gloves, and enters the ring before returning to the game board.
Victory is achieved by knockout, checkmate, forfeiture of time on the chess clock, forfeiture due to discipline or referee stop.
Ironically, Medley believed that boxing was more important, quipping, “It’s like asking who would win in chessboxing, Prime Mike Tyson or Prime Magnus Karlsson.”
But Alex Selden, who runs ChessBoxing NYC with his wife Cassandra Angelini Vasquez, told the Post that the match is more “driven by chess.”
“I think 70% of the matches end in checkmate or time running out.” [for the chess game]” said Selden, a three-time Nassau County chess champion, but said chess players need to be fluent enough in fistfights “to not potentially get knocked out in the first round of boxing.”
The origins of this somewhat underground pastime date back to a 1992 comic by French graphic novelist Enki Bilal, and in 2003 Dutch performance artist Jeppe Rubing staged the first live chess-boxing match in Berlin, which went on to become popular across Europe.
“When you put them together, you get a pretty unique character,” Selden said.
He first saw footage of the sport in 2013 while attending college in Syracuse and thought the sport was a great fit for Gotham, given the city’s legendary boxing and chess scenes.
In the spring of 2020, Selden was waiting for a call from Rubin to discuss the future of brain and brawn biathlon.
But the phone didn’t ring. He later learned that Rubin had died that morning.
“It was just a lightning bolt moment where I was like, ‘I’m going to do it no matter what,'” Selden declared.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, he spent six months learning boxing with various trainers while also starting a chess club called Bushwick Chess, allowing him to “make connections” in that world before merging the two pastimes.
Although Gleason gym owner Bruce Silverglade helped fuel the boom, avid boxers initially didn’t know what to make of the movement.
“They said, ‘Why do these people hit the bag and then play chess?'” Angelini Vazquez pointed out.
There are currently three major chessboxing clubs in New York City: Chessboxing NYC, ITC Chessboxing, and Manhattan Chessboxing.
Angelini Vazquez said the sport attracts a very “diverse audience”, from people in finance to technology to people from jiu-jitsu and other martial arts backgrounds.
“We also have a few women who are interested in chess, because for them it’s like, ‘Oh, if we have chess, boxing might be more accessible,'” she said.
What is the appeal of this somewhat contradictory pursuit? “Being just the right health is overrated, and being the smartest is overrated. It’s fun to be good at both, and I think it’s cathartic to do both at the same time,” Angelini Vazquez explained.
“For me, it’s like a mental triathlon,” she says, adding that it provides a fun, easy-going respite in a city where people often take everything too seriously.
However, mastering this hipster activity is no mean feat.
In addition to weekly chess boxing training, Medley competes in weekend chess tournaments, takes private lessons throughout the week, and even wakes up at 6 a.m. to practice boxing at a local gym.
“It’s not just about how good you are at chess or how good you are at boxing,” he explained. “When you’re in that primal zone, the challenge is how deep you can reach and hold on to the chess player, because you’d be surprised how much your chess ELO (Chess Player Evaluation System) drops after one round of boxing.”
A 2019 study of boxers and Muay Thai athletes found that just three three-minute sparring rounds led to memory loss and impaired communication between the brain and muscles.
Of course, there are also concerns about head injuries.
Even Medley admits that the sport is “kind of contradictory” given that chess is considered “good for the brain” while boxing is the opposite.
But, he added, “the human brain and body actually decay every day.” “And none of us will make it out of this alive.”
Selden stressed that organizers are taking a responsible approach to entertainment. “This is a real punch to the face. This is real boxing, this is real chess,” he said. “There are no special tricks. Safety first is the most important thing.”
Chessboxing is not sanctioned by the New York Athletic Commission, so matches are limited to exhibitions and amateur showcases.
He hopes his experience in New York City’s notoriously tough martial arts scene will legitimize what is considered an underground blood sport.
“Our goal is to get USA Boxing friendly so we can host matches here on a regular basis,” he said. “But you could also see copycat clubs popping up, maybe in the greater New York area or the tri-state area. I think there’s a lot of potential.”
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