Cai ‘Bosh’ Brigden prowls across the canvas, gloves raised and the faintest smile playing on his face.
At 6ft 1in and 88kg, the fighter has a significant reach advantage over his smaller opponent, Shayan ‘The Kingstonian’ Zarein Dolab. Inside the ring, however, appearances mean little.
Suddenly trapped against the ropes, The Kingstonian fires a savage one-two into Cai’s midriff, his fists pumping like pistons on a runaway steam train.
Cai staggers. For a moment, time appears to freeze and the crowd collectively holds its breath. Then the bell sounds.
Yet this is not a conventional boxing break, when fighters spit blood into buckets and cover cuts with Vaseline. Cai and Shayan remove their gloves, put on noise-cancelling ear defenders and sit on opposite sides of a chessboard, their hearts still racing at around 180 beats per minute.
Cai advances a pawn to E5, prompting a wave of excitement from the audience. Could he really be preparing the Budapest Gambit, an aggressive opening that involves sacrificing a piece early?
Sweat drips from wrists, brows and elbows onto the board. Neither competitor appears to notice, or care.
This is chessboxing: the extraordinary hybrid sport that demands brains, stamina and the ability to trade punches, and which is rapidly gaining ground in Britain.
By hook or by rook: Fred works on his boxing moves
The familiar truth emerges: playing chess after a round of boxing is extraordinarily difficult
The format is straightforward: competitors alternate rounds of chess and boxing until the contest ends by checkmate, knockout or another decisive result.
Above the stage at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, where this exhibition bout took place earlier this week before 500 chess fans, a giant screen shows tongue-in-cheek images of the fighters. Their faces have been digitally placed on muscular, shirtless bodies created by AI.
The sport is serious, and injuries are real. Even so, organisers understand the value of spectacle. Events often feature elaborate choreographed entrances, while two commentators in lederhosen entertain the crowd with a stream of decidedly risqué double entendres.
Back at the chessboard in north London, Cai and Shayan are moving at a frantic pace. Each makes 18 moves in barely 90 seconds as their shot clocks tick down. If a player’s clock reaches zero, they automatically lose the chess portion of the contest.
The body shots Cai absorbed appear to be taking a toll on his concentration.
“The trick is to land your biggest punches just before the round ends, so your opponent is unsettled when they return to the chessboard,” Chessboxing Nation managing director Gavin Paterson had predicted before the bout.
His theory quickly proves accurate. Cai makes a tactical error and allows Shayan’s knight to take his queen — a mistake he may well have avoided had he not just been hammered in the stomach.
Still, after three boxing rounds and three chess rounds, Cai wins when Shayan’s clock finally runs out. By rook or by hook, the result is his.
Pictured: Gavin Paterson, managing director of Chessboxing Nation
Pictured: the first Battle Royale chessboxing event at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2012
“My mind was still in the ring,” the beaten challenger says afterwards, reflecting on his failure to make the most of his early advantage.
The referee calls both fighters back to the canvas and lifts Cai’s arm. The audience applauds, though many spectators seem unsure exactly what they have just witnessed.
Boxing dates back to the seventh century BC, while chess emerged in India around the sixth century AD. It would take nearly 1,400 years, however, for the two disciplines to be fused into a single competition.
The combination is not quite as strange as it first sounds.
Before major fights, British heavyweight great Lennox Lewis famously played chess to sharpen his focus.
After retiring, he opened a boxing academy in Jamaica and hired a chess coach as well. “It creates discipline, patience and strategy,” Lewis said in 2015.
In 1979, competitive boxing brothers James and Stewart Robinson were reportedly playing chess between training rounds at the Samuel Montagu Boys Club in south-east London. The first official chessboxing contest, however, did not take place until 2003 in Amsterdam. It was devised by the late Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh, who had encountered the concept in a 1992 French comic book.
Rubingh entered the contest himself and won in the 11th round, effectively becoming the sport’s first world champion. He later worked as an on-set consultant for the hit Netflix chess drama The Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy.
Fred Kelly puts on the gloves during a session at Islington Boxing Gym in north London
Rubingh’s life, along with his efforts to establish rules and structure for the sport, was later documented in the 2021 film By Rook or Left Hook: The Story of Chessboxing.
Nearly a quarter of a century after Rubingh’s debut, chessboxing is flourishing in Britain under Chessboxing Nation, the sport’s administrative body led by Paterson.
The organisation stages a modest annual programme of events. At this year’s Oktoberfist, 47-year-old veteran Matt ‘Crazy Arms’ Read marked the end of a 20-year career by beating Anthony ‘Toto the Robot’ Bourached before 600 spectators at the Scala in London’s King’s Cross.
Chessboxing Nation also stages Season’s Beatings at Christmas and the St Patrick’s Day Bash each March, events that recreate the boisterous, beer-soaked atmosphere of a night at the darts.
Every bout is overseen by the charismatic fan favourite Reinaldo Dominguez, a former Cuban junior boxing champion with 30-inch dreadlocks. A large screen displays the chessboard so the audience can follow every move.
“We can regularly sell 600 tickets without putting too much effort into marketing,” Gavin tells me at Islington Boxing Gym, where I have arrived to pull on gloves and try not to be punched in the face.
“Yet it’s still viewed as a cult activity, despite the number of people who want to fight, train and compete. We could probably fill each event’s line-up three or four times over.”
Gavin discovered chessboxing in 2012, when he watched a contest at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. The bouts were “seat-of-the-pants” affairs in a shabby building whose décor “hadn’t changed since the 1970s”. For Gavin, a charity worker by day, the atmosphere was irresistible.
Cai ‘Bosh’ Brigden is a 6ft 1in, 88kg chessboxer
“It’s an open and welcoming community,” says the managing director, trainer and fighter. “You meet fascinating, unconventional people from all sorts of backgrounds, and that’s one of the things I enjoy most.”
The obvious question before my first training session is this: what makes a successful chessboxer?
“You need real ability in both disciplines,” Gavin says, looking me over with what appears to be some doubt. “We’ve had two grandmasters compete in our shows. But you also have to be extremely fit.”
For Gavin, no one demonstrates that combination more impressively than Samy Shoker, the 39-year-old Egyptian fighter and chess grandmaster. Shoker won the European Middleweight Chessboxing Championship in 2025.
“He’s incredibly coordinated and light on his feet,” Gavin recalls. “His boxing was immaculate, and his chess was among the best I’ve seen in a chessboxing room.”
Even grandmasters can unravel when the pressure of the ring intrudes. In 2024, grandmaster Simon ‘Wildman’ Williams lost his queen moments after Matthew ‘Minotaur’ Coldwell broke his nose. Williams recovered to win the fight, but the blunder remains one of chessboxing’s most memorable warnings.
Before I enter the ring, I receive some advice from Cai ‘Bosh’ Brigden, winner of this week’s exhibition bout. The 36-year-old first heard about chessboxing from a friend in 2010. It was not until 2023, while taking small doses of psychedelic psilocybin to address his loss of smell, that “a little voice appeared out of nowhere in my head and said: ‘chessboxing!’”
Three years on, Cai has fought twice competitively with his father in his corner, employed two separate chess coaches and become so devoted to the sport that he hopes to make a film about it one day.
That ambition may not be surprising. Cai is an actor whose credits include the long-running soaps Casualty and EastEnders, as well as Bridgerton.
“When I’m fighting, everything around me disappears,” says Cai, who has young twins. “I walked out of my first session with a huge smile on my face. I was buzzing and immediately knew: this is definitely what I enjoy.”
These days, Cai runs around Crystal Palace while pushing his twins in a buggy, then studies chess in the early hours. His partner, Hannah, is supportive enough. “She just doesn’t want to see me injured — although she’ll watch the fights back on YouTube once she knows I haven’t been knocked out.”
With the words “knocked out” echoing in my mind, it is time to pull on a pair of 16oz gloves and join Gavin Paterson’s weekly chessboxing class at Islington Boxing Gym.
After 90 minutes of painstaking footwork drills and a basic introduction to the Sicilian Defence, I find myself touching gloves with Alex, a 31-year-old trainee barrister who is also trying the sport for the first time.
“Everyone I’ve told thinks it sounds ridiculous and brilliant,” Alex says with a grin. “It’s certainly outside my comfort zone.”
Gavin gives us both one simple instruction: try not to hit the face.
To everyone’s surprise — including Gavin’s — I perform well in the ring, landing a series of sharp jabs that force the legal trainee onto the back foot.
Then comes the chess. Fueled by adrenaline and a heart rate of roughly 175 beats per minute, I am reminded of the sport’s oldest truth: boxing makes chess remarkably difficult. Alex, who regularly plays online, eventually wins when my shot clock reaches zero.
“I didn’t realise how much concentration it required,” Alex says, still breathing heavily after being chased around the ring. “You have to stay completely switched on while performing all those movements.”
Bruised in spirit, I ask trainer Gavin Paterson for his assessment.
“You followed my instructions, for one thing,” he begins, wearing the faintest smile. “That may sound minor, but you’d be amazed how many people don’t. You have basic coordination, and that takes you a long way… Ultimately, I liked your enthusiasm.”
Could Gavin be tempted to put me in a competitive bout — perhaps against Cai ‘Bosh’ Brigden before 600 spectators at next year’s St Patrick’s Day Bash?
Gavin pauses. “You’ll improve.”
I cannot help thinking he is trying to let me down gently. Not quite a knockout blow — more a checkmate.