At the center of the Doug Bolstorff Court on Saturday, March 1 sat two objects rarely seen together in the same room, let alone with an audience: a chessboard and a wrestling mat. As spectators watched in rapt silence, a Macalester instant classic unfolded: chess-wrestling.
Chess-wrestling derives from its more sadistic ancestor, chess boxing. The idea behind the two mashup sports is simple: combine the mental battle of chess with a physical battle. Chess-wrestling arose because its predecessor posed too much risk to its participants. According to the National Library of Medicine, “boxers have a significantly elevated risk of sustaining a concussion compared with other combat sports.”
Wrestling does not carry that same danger. In fact, Sofia Doroshenko ’25, who created and organized and competed in the chess-wrestling event on Saturday, claims that the two share a tactical resemblance.
“Wrestling itself is like chess in a way to me, because I’m thinking a few moves ahead all the time,” Doroshenko said. “And in chess that’s very slow. Methodical … It’s, ‘okay, if they do this, then I do that. Okay, what is this variation gonna look like?’ And, in wrestling, you can do that too … [maybe] I’m gonna pull them by the arm, and maybe they pull away from me…well, now I have to follow it up with a different combination, and if that doesn’t work, what do I do next?”
Chess-wrestling alternates between the two activities. It starts with three minutes of chess, followed by two minutes of wrestling and switches back and forth for a total of 16 minutes (18 for another round of wrestling if a tiebreaker is necessary).
Each of the two players get five minutes of chess playing time total, and automatically lose if their five-minute chess timer expires. To win, a player must either put their opponent in checkmate on the chessboard or pin them on the mat. Though the chess and wrestling portions are separated, Doroshenko believes that they affect each other.
“At first the idea does sound silly, but then we actually did it, and people were getting really stressed on the chessboard,” Doroshenko said. “If they were losing on the chessboard, it would affect them psychologically in the wrestling, or the other way around … this forces you to kind of fight for your life the whole time, and it just puts people into this adrenaline mode. And it’s just so interesting to watch, psychologically.”
According to Doroshenko, wins come just as often on the board as they do in the ring. This was true when she ran the first chess-wrestling pilot event a year ago, and it remained true at the bigger event on Saturday.
Still, while this amalgamation of skill sets attracts people who are both talented chess players and wrestlers, most competitors specialize in one or the other. One of those competitors was Mason Mongiat, an experienced wrestler who has taught club martial arts at Macalester for about a decade.
“My skill set was very unbalanced,” Mongiat said. “I have played less than 30 games of chess throughout my entire life, but I’ve been wrestling for a very long time. So, I had definitely formulated some game plans as to how I was going to win, given that I could assume I was just going to lose to everybody in chess eventually at some point.”
For Mongiat, the priority was to survive on the board long enough to get to the mat, where he felt he could pin almost anyone at the event. In his first match, this strategy worked, although he got off to a dodgy start.
“I performed abysmally at chess,” Mongiat said. “Got put in a bad spot really early … as soon as I started, [and when] I was in the moment, it became very hard. [My opponent] playing quick forced me to play quick. I want to play fast enough where I don’t run out of time. But I don’t want to play quick and just make a bunch of mistakes. And for the first match, for sure, [I] just played quick, made a bunch of mistakes, and then I took 60 seconds to make my last two moves, just hoping that I could go win [in the wrestling portion].”
He did exactly that. Though his opponent forced him to grapple, Mongiat had weight and experience on his side and got the pin within a minute.
His second match was a different story. He challenged one of the best chess-wrestlers at the event: a stellar chess player who also happened to be a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with a roughly 60-pound weight advantage over him. The match went about as well as Mongiat could’ve hoped.
Although he tried to take it slower the second time around, Mongiat burrowed himself into another quick hole on the chessboard and decided to let time wind down so he at least got a shot in the ring.
“When you’re a smaller guy wrestling against a bigger guy, typically, I try to get the person tired a little bit first and then they don’t have the endurance to just squeeze and be strong the whole time,” Mongiat said. “The first shot I took, I definitely got in pretty deep on his legs, but then he sprawled out, threw his legs back, and I definitely felt all 200 pounds of him, and I was not able to complete that takedown.
“I think we had a second scramble. He almost scored a takedown on me, which would have massively, massively hurt my pride and ego as a wrestler against a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu person, but we went out of bounds, and then I was able to secure a takedown on him.”
That takedown did not result in a pin, and once they returned to the board, his opponent vanquished him in just two moves. Despite his mixed results, Mongiat thoroughly enjoyed the mashup event and advocated for Macalester to continue to participate in Doroshenko’s Frankensport for years to come.
“I thought it was very fun,” he said. “It’s definitely cool to have that rare intersection of ‘very cerebral’ hobbies like chess and then ‘physical sport’ activities like wrestling. Bringing those two together, seeing what kind of weird people come out of the woodwork who happen to like both those things.”
