Checkmate, sucka!…
A Russian man has been crowned world champion in the novelty sport of chess boxing, a game that requires equal skill at moving pawns and throwing punches.
Mathematics student Nikolai Sazhin, 19, competing under the name “The President” knocked out a 37-year-old German policeman Frank Stoldt, who served as a peacekeeper in Kosovo until recently.
The loser said he was simply too punch-drunk to fend off checkmate.
“I took a lot of body-blows in the fourth round and that affected my concentration. That’s why I made a big mistake in the fifth round: I did not see him coming for my king,” he said.
The match began over a chess board set up on a low table in the middle of a boxing ring.
Stripped to the waist, wearing towels around their shoulders and headphones playing the lulling sound of a moving train to drown out the baying crowd, the men played for four minutes.
Then off came their reading glasses and on went the gloves and the mouthguards.
For three minutes they beat each other and then, when the bell went, the chess board was back in the ring and they picked up the gentlemanly game where they had left off.
“This is the hard part, you are out of breath but you have to keep your wits about you,” said David Steppeler, a 33-year-old instructor at a Berlin local chess boxing club.
“It is especially hard for the one who has to play first. He can easily make a false move, and in chess this is fatal. So in training we toughen people by making them do push-ups between every two chess moves.”
A chess boxing match consists of six rounds of chess and five in the ring but it can also end suddenly in knockout or checkmate.
Read the full story in this news.com.au article.
As we contemplate our next moves, we might light an (electric) birthday candle for the Serbian genius Nikola Tesla. The unit of magnetic flux in the metric system is the ‘tesla’; his Tesla Coil supplies the high voltage for the computer monitor you are looking at; the electricity for your computer comes from a Tesla design AC generator, is sent through a Tesla transformer, and gets to your house through 3-phase Tesla power; and the electric power of Niagara Falls was harnessed through his inventions. Even today, many texts still credit Marconi with the invention of radio, despite the Supreme Court decision which overruled the Marconi patent, awarding it to Tesla. And in many parts of this country, people still Edison as the father of electricity, though they use the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating current system, not Edison’s direct current.
