The Art of Chessboxing

HANNAH WEAVER, HOST:

The sport of chessboxing has been around since 2003. You may be thinking… what is chessboxing? Not surprisingly, it combines both, in alternate rounds until a player wins by checkmate or knockout. This year’s world championship will be in Serbia this September. It may seem odd to combine two such different sports, but as reporter Flora Warshaw discovers, chessboxing is just one aspect of a new resurgence of chess.

FLORA WARSHAW, BYLINE: William Graif wants to be the best in the world.

WILLIAM GRAIF (YOUTUBE CLIP): I am going to be the chessboxing world champion. What the heck does that mean?...

WARSHAW: The best in the world… at chessboxing. He is currently the New York State Chess Champion. I’m with Graif in his apartment in Williamsburg, as he prepares for a big chess boxing match tonight. He’s running around his small kitchen looking for his mouthguard and preparing his breakfast.

GRAIF:  How many protein bars do I eat a day? Maybe five. Maybe five.

WARSHAW: It doesn't sound that extreme when you say it like that.

GRAIF: Yeah, I would say. Yeah, that might be the main way I get grams of protein.

WARSHAW: Graif wasn’t always the typical boxing build. In fact before he picked up chessboxing, he weighed about 130 pounds, and would describe himself as a stick. He jokes with me that you don’t need to be muscular to play chess, the pieces don’t weigh that much.

GRAIF: So I've put on about 20, 25 pounds of muscle, I would say, throughout this journey. I kind of just do things the easiest way for me. And so a lot of that is just putting everything into the blender that I need right after working out. I take, uh, all my nutrients that I need in pill form and otherwise, yeah, I'm trying to be the best that I can be.

WARSHAW: Once his breakfast of pills and protein powder has wrapped up, we head down to Gleason's Gym in Dumbo for a practice match ahead of the big fight tonight. It’s incredibly loud and you can taste the sweat in the air. To the left and right of me people are hitting black punching bags. This gym has seen numerous boxing champions from all eras, from the likes of Mohammed Ali to Mike Tyson. But now it’s welcoming the world of chess boxing, and opening up Gleason’s to a new audience.

MATT THOMAS: Seconds out! Three, two, one... shake hands and we're going!

WARSHAW: Graif and his opponent are arranging their pieces on a chess board set up in the center of the ring to start the first round. They’re wearing full on boxing headgear and handwraps. So the maximum amount of rounds there can be are 3 rounds of chess and 2 rounds of boxing and the third round of chess must be decisive. And everything is 3 minutes at a time.

WARSHAW: And now the chess board has been removed… and they’re boxing. Graif is landing some jabs to the head and body of his opponent and exploding with several flurries as his opponent comes in. This was an incredibly successful practice match for Graif.

But later on that evening, at the real chessboxing event, Graif wins with an incredible rook to D8, leading to an inevitable checkmate

THOMAS: The winner with the white pieces Fide Master William Graif!

WARSHAW: Now to put the popularity of this match into context, this was a sold out event, with over 200 people attending, paying for their ticket. So what is about chessboxing that attracts such an audience?

I won’t lie when I originally heard of chessboxing I immediately thought that it was to do with the growing popularity of hypermasculinity in sport… seen with the likes of Elon musk wanting to fight Mark Zuckerberg and youtuber Jake Paul fighting Mike Tyson.

YOUTUBE CLIP: Fighting out of the blue corner, here is Jake Paul!

WARSHAW: But many in the chessboxing community disagree with this assumption, like Heather Brown. She’s standing right by the ring watching Graif fight. She organized today’s chessboxing match and also runs the North Brooklyn chess club.

HEATHER BROWN: I don't necessarily see it as, you know, this, this, this hypermasculine idea of let's make, you know, a nerdy sport sexy, or like, let's make a nerdy sport masculine. I think it's very congruent partnership between two of the hardest sports, chess being a very high intellect, difficult game to master. And same with boxing.

WARSHAW: As she explains, chessboxing requires a high amount of skill, switching between such an extreme physical and mental activity. But more importantly, chessboxers are not trying to make a nerdy sport masculine.

The pandemic saw a boom in chess players, with Chess.com, an online site to play chess, doubling their number of monthly users from roughly 8 million to nearly 17 million between 2020 and 2022. Now, it boasts around 20 million users.

Even just plain old chess is taking off, and chessboxing is just another way to ignite the chess community.

GRAIF:  Some people were cool in high school. I, on the other hand, played chess in high school, but I think times have changed.

WARSHAW: I didn’t know Will back in high school, but you should know that we’re friends, and I’ll occasionally watch him stream his chess playing. Chess streaming is another example of chess’s growing popularity and just one of the ways Graif found his fanbase.

GRAIF: Generally when I tell people I'm a chess YouTuber, I'm a chess streamer, you know, and they're like, what's your, what's your rating? And I tell them, this is something that is impressive, even though it's like I play a board game. And so I think it's kind of been a nerd uprising of sorts.

GRAIF (YOUTUBE CLIP): There three. Okay, wait, can we get our very first? Yes!...

WARSHAW: Graif has nearly 10,000 subscribers who watch him play Chess.com. His videos often get thousands of views. Matt Bader is just one of many of Graif’s fans and he says the community Graif has built is just one of the reasons he enjoys watching him stream.

MATT BADER:  He plays against, you know, titled players just like him. Uh, and he wins. You know, that's, that's the really exciting thing. Uh, so he, he really gives hope to this school for romantic chess where we can be dramatic and bold and sacrifice things and have fun and, you know, just, you know, create chaos on the board. Uh, and it's really, really fun to watch him do his thing. So that's why I watch FM William Graif, that's why I watch his stream.

WARSHAW: Chess is even invading the NYC nightlife. Some of the hottest clubs in New York City… are chess clubs. Isabel Münter and Simone Robert, are the owners of PawnChess. Tonight is their latest event down at Casino in the Lower East Side. It's bustling here in this small restaurant. It’s dim, intimate lighting. Everyone is dressed up, sipping dirty martinis and eating french fries and… playing chess! Pawnchess is here to make chess cool and bring it to the mainstream.

ISABEL MÜNTER:  Yeah, I mean, this is a totally different vibe than what the classical, normal chess club is. You have Marshalls, you have chess forum. It's usually older guys. It's a very intimidating vibe, especially for beginners. So the whole idea was that, well, Simone and I wanna get back into chess. We wanna play with our friends in bars and restaurants where we would have drinks otherwise. So like go to an intimate space where you can have a dirty martini and like sit over a chess board and just like have a conversation and learn to play chess again.

WARSHAW: Graif is also here, at the center table, playing on a roll out mat with plastic chess pieces. His opponent is not faring too well. He’s managed to attract a bit of a crowd around him as he plays, watching his every move.

GRAIF: This is awesome i love these events just being like social with the game. Okay what do we got…

WARSHAW: Graif has four months to practice and get his skills up to scratch before he heads to Serbia where he’s hoping to win at the world chessboxing championships. Flora Warshaw, Columbia Radio News.