Thai Break

What it is

Thai Break is the third edition of a match between two friends running since 2019. No club, no federation, no event open to the public: two people who agreed one night in 2019 and never really stopped.

The rules are written nowhere, but they settled on their own across editions:

• The discipline changes every time: savate in 2019, MMA in 2023, chessboxing in 2026.
• The aliases never change: Gary la Bête against Saad El Chungo, from day one.
• There has to be a real setup: a referee, a judge, timed rounds, a decision that counts.
• There has to be a poster: a dedicated logo, an online event, a live stream.
• The decision is never contested: three editions, no disagreement on the result.

The app

More than anything, this edition was my chance to get familiar with Claude Code. It is what I built the app with, in a few days, where the same work would have taken me months otherwise.

The app runs the whole flow of a chessboxing match: timing the boxing and chess rounds, and automatically capturing the moves from a connected board.

• Individual chess clocks: per-player time (9 min by default) and increment (0 by default).
• Round configuration: chess round (3 min), boxing round (3 min), interval (1 min).
• Tap to switch: during chess rounds, each player taps their panel once they have moved.
• Chessnut e-board (optional): connect a Chessnut Air / Air+ over Bluetooth for automatic turn switching on every legal move (iOS/Android dev build).
• Pause: pause and resume the match at any time.
• Restore seconds: add +5, +10 or +15s to a player (referee use).
• Game history: saved games with date, winner, times and round reached; JSON export.
• Round change sound: a phase beep on every transition between rounds.
• Custom interval music: assign your own audio to intervals 1 to 10 (iOS/Android).
• Cross-platform: web, iOS and Android.

It is the technical artefact of Thai Break. Without it, the format would be impossible to referee cleanly: two chess clocks, two boxing timers, and transitions you cannot miss.

The game

This is the app that timed the third edition, on 29 April. Here is the game it recorded, to replay move by move; the story of the fight comes further down, with the history of the three editions.

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|« ‹ Starting position › »|

Edition 1 — Mohamed Al’IF (December 2019)

The first fight took place at the Carré Magique, the outdoor space between residences E, F and I at INSA Lyon. The name comes from us, and it is still used on campus today, by people who have no idea where it came from.

Discipline: savate, three rounds of three minutes. Bets went around in the crowd.

It was my first time in that discipline: a few Krav Maga classes years earlier, nothing more. Saad, on the other hand, was actually training at the school’s boxing club. He won on points, no knockout. A clean defeat in a sport I was discovering that very evening.

Edition 2 — OneForce (March 2023)

Four years later. In the meantime we had left student life in Lyon for Paris: me at Salesforce, Saad at Onepoint. Hence the edition’s name, OneForce — the professional rivalry turned into an actual fight.

This time it was MMA: we change discipline every edition. Frank refereeing, Julie judging.

Preparation came down to one word: cardio. Neither of us was doing any sport at the time. We rented a room in Paris. We wanted a cage, we could only find a square boxing ring: so it would be MMA in a square ring. Five-minute rounds. I took the lead in the second round by getting him to the ground, and the decision came in the third, on points. A win.

Edition 3 — Thai Break (April 2026)

Hence chessboxing, which alternates rounds of English boxing and games of chess, with two ways to lose instead of one. We change discipline every edition, mostly for the fun of taking on something new.

At chess we are roughly the same level, each training on our own. On the fighting side I had signed up for Muay Thai in September, Saad for MMA; but chessboxing is boxed in English rules, so each of us had to adapt.

The logistics

In late April, Ko Samui offers the best weather window on the island: its rainy season is offset from the rest of Thailand (October to December, peaking in November). Hot, dry, calm sea.

We rented an entire boxing club for four hours for the occasion, as a group of about a dozen people.

The fight

A defeat on the board, on time. The series goes to 2-1 for Saad.

The game lasted 58 moves, out of a Caro-Kann: I had Black, Saad answered with the advance variation, 3.e5. The queens came off early (14.Qxg5). Saad won the exchange on a double move, 15.Nc7+ followed by 16.Nxa8, but his knight stayed buried in the corner on a8, and I clawed material back right after.

The game then simplified down to a pawn endgame. The rooks left the board on move 34 (34.Rxh4 Kxh4), leaving only a passed-pawn race on both sides. We promoted almost at the same time: his queen on move 39, mine right after with check (39.b8=Q g1=Q+).

In the queen endgame, my checks eventually dislodged his king, and I won his queen (46…Qxb8). From there I was ahead: a queen up, with an e-pawn one move from promotion.

The flag fell before I could push it.

That is the trap of the format. After several rounds of boxing, calculation costs far more: you double-check every line because you no longer trust yourself, and it is the clock that ends up deciding. Losing a winning position on time is probably the fairest way to understand this sport. The game is above, to replay move by move.