Battle of the Minds: 4 legends compete in chess and poker
Chess grandmasters Peter Svidler and Alexander Grischuk paired with poker pros Patrick Leonard and Isaac Haxton for a partypoker-sponsored exhibition mixing hand-and-mind chess with heads-up sit-and-go poker.
Chess24, in partnership with partypoker, staged a livestreamed exhibition called "Battle of the Minds" on March 12, 2021, pairing two chess grandmasters with two professional poker players in a format that combined both games. Grandmasters Peter Svidler and Alexander Grischuk each teamed with a poker pro -- Svidler with Patrick Leonard, and Grischuk with Isaac Haxton -- to compete across three rounds, each featuring one chess game and one poker sit-and-go played simultaneously.
Chess24 promoted the pairing on social media by asking, "Always wanted to watch Peter Svidler and Alexander Grischuk play poker? They will respectively be paired with Patrick Leonard and Isaac Haxton to battle in a poker & chess match!" The pairing leaned on cross-disciplinary star power: Leonard and Haxton are established names in professional poker, while Svidler and Grischuk are longtime elite grandmasters.
How the hybrid format worked
Each team trained in the other player's discipline ahead of the match -- Grischuk and Haxton worked together, as did Svidler and Leonard. The chess portion used a "hand-and-mind" rule, in which one teammate chose which piece to move while the other decided where to move it; the poker professionals took the "hand" role, physically making the moves their grandmaster partner selected. The chess games were played with a 12-minute clock and a ten-second Fischer increment.
The poker side of the pairing
The poker component consisted of turbo heads-up sit-and-go matches, with teammates alternating who played each street of a hand rather than one player controlling the whole hand. The two matchups streamed separately on chess24's channels, giving each side's grandmaster-poker pairing its own broadcast rather than combining both into a single feed. A later chess24 headline, archived under the title "Grischuk and Haxton beat Svidler and Leonard in an epic way," indicates that pairing won the exhibition, though the retrievable text of that article no longer returns the set-by-set score.
Why two rival poker platforms both ended up on chess24
The match doubled as a cross-promotion between chess24 and the poker platform partypoker, according to ChessTech News coverage of the tie-in. That coverage noted the pairing was notable because partypoker's parent company, Entain, is a direct competitor of Kindred Group -- the gambling operator that already sponsored world champion Magnus Carlsen, chess24's own co-founder, through its Unibet brand. ChessTech observed that Kindred "doesn't contract poker professionals of Haxton's and Leonard's level," which it framed as the promotional edge partypoker gained by securing two established pros for the exhibition despite the competing sponsorship ties running through chess24 itself.
ChessTech's coverage also traced chess24's own history in the poker industry: the site's founder, Enrique (Jan) Guzman, previously earned income from PokerStrategy before helping found chess24, which merged with Carlsen's Play Magnus Group in 2019. That background, the outlet suggested, made chess24 a natural bridge for a crossover audience even with the sponsorship overlap between the two poker brands.
A one-off exhibition, not a rivalry
The March 12 team match was a standalone exhibition rather than part of a running series -- chess24's promotional material and event listings for "Battle of the Minds" centered on this single livestreamed pairing of the four players rather than a bracket or season format. The hybrid hand-and-mind chess rule, borrowed from a format chess24 had used in other entertainment broadcasts, was paired here for the first time with a full poker sit-and-go structure rather than a simple side bet or informal game, making the March event a genuine test of whether a chess grandmaster's strategic input could be executed by a poker professional's hands under both games' time pressure simultaneously.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by chess24.com and subsequent reporting on the promotion by ChessTech News. It restores a story originally published on this site in March 2021; figures are as reported at the time.