Chess-Karate? Chess-Jitsu? News from the C-Squared Podcast

Cristian Chirila and Fabiano Caruana welcomed FM James Canty III and chessboxing leader Matt Thomas to their C-Squared Podcast to talk about chessboxing, covering a range of topics from the Chessboxing World Championships, to potential sports science and training similarities between chess and boxing. Caruana, for instance, was very interested in the short reset period between a round of boxing, and switching suddenly to chess. The episode concluded with Thomas making a dual announcement about the future of chessboxing.

In the wake of the sport’s exposure on the news show 60 Minutes, Thomas will be running a “Team USA tryout tour” in 2026, circling through the bigger US markets to give more people the opportunity to test it out, anywhere from low-stakes to high-stakes.

The big announcement was described by Thomas as for those for whom “head trauma is the main thing keeping you from chessboxing; if you still want to do something like this with a lot less risk, we will be rolling out other chess-combat hybrids in 2026.” In partnership with other organizations like chess.com, and a currently unnamed large sports organization, the plan is to initiate hybrids of chess and karate, taekwondo, judo, grappling, and jiujitsu. The last of those especially caught Chirila’s attention, as a jiujitsu enthusiast himself.

You can watch the full hour-plus episode on the C-Squared Youtube channel.

Photo: WCBO, via Wikipedia