At six years old, Josh Waitzkin was one of the toughest chess players on earth. His creative and aggressive style made him one of the most feared American chess players ever. His style was a fusion of his years being raised by chess hustlers in New York’s Washington Square Park and his classical guidance under Bruce Pandolfini. His early life was made into the cult classic film Searching For Bobby Fischer.
After leaving chess, he discovered the martial art of Tai Chi Chuan. After training in Tai Chi Chuan, he realized how much marital arts and chess are connected. On his path to becoming a two-time world champion in Tai Chi Chuan, he learned about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He wrote a book about his experience entitled The Art of Learning. It became a best seller and is used by CEO’s and fighters alike who seek a higher level of understanding.

I first met Josh at the second Hip-Hop Chess Federation event with the RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan. I remember how well he and RZA connected like old friends from the second they met. Josh is a living hieroglyph of the idea that chess and martial arts are one.

In this interview Josh Waitzkin talks about his path to learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the relationship between chess and martial arts and his philosophy about the lack of philosophy in BJJ.


OTM: How were you first introduced to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and when did you begin training?

JW: I began training BJJ out in LA with John Machado about 5 years ago. But for the first two years, 90% of my energy was focused on stand up, getting ready for the 2004 Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands Worlds. For the past three years I’ve been focused exclusively on Jiu Jitsu, with John out west, then in New York City at NYBJJ with Marcos Santos. I also worked a lot with Marcelo Garcia while he was in New York, which was incredible.


OTM: You are a two time world champion in Tai Chi Chuan. Many BJJ practitioners write off styles like Tai Chi. Why do you think that is?

JW: I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Tai Chi Chuan by William CC Chen, who is humble, understated, very practical, a true master of body mechanics, and a fabulous teacher. He is well into his seventies and is still a demon in the boxing ring. If grapplers were exposed to William Chen’s Tai Chi, they wouldn’t write it off.

But to answer your question—honestly, a very large percentage of Tai Chi practitioners have their heads in the clouds…and they are the ones who make the most noise, stage the silly fake demonstrations, and create a cultish mindset that a practical fighter can just walk right through. I’d write them off too. Plus the system has little groundwork and most teachers are still closed minded about that element of the martial arts. Frankly, I think this problem is rampant in many traditional martial arts—teachers are terrified of looking bad and losing students so they create a world that denies what they don’t know.

On the other hand, if you travel to Taiwan and China and focus on the top competitors, the Tai Chi scene becomes incredibly dynamic. The rules of International Push Hands comptition are that you are in an 18 foot diameter ring and points are scored for throwing the guy on the floor or out of the ring. No frills. The fighters are superb athletes, training 6 and 8 hours a day since childhood, competing all the time. There is no fancy esoteric language—they just smash you on the floor with a speed and power that is breathtaking. They are open-minded, incredibly subtle, and of a very similar spirit to the top BJJ fighters.

The chess world made me practical, so I always challenged and rejected the elements of the Tai Chi scene that were overly idealized. If someone told me they could throw me without touching me, I asked them to do it. If they said they could kill me with a touch, I said I’d be willing to take the risk. This led to some pretty funny scenes and was an easy way to filter out the nonsense.


OTM: What benefits from Tai Chi do you bring to BJJ and vice versa?

JW: Well, the learning process begins from different places but arrives, ideally, at a similar feeling. In BJJ, you tend to begin with technique, and through repetition you come to a smooth, efficient, unobstructed body mechanics. In Tai Chi, you begin with body mechanics, get a certain internal feeling over months and years of moving meditative practice, and then you learn the martial application of what you’ve been doing all along.

The essence of Tai Chi is sensitivity to intention. Turning force against itself, overcoming power without meeting it head on. Of course these principles are at the heart Jiu Jitsu as well. In my mind, the arts are completely intertwined and to be honest, the purest Tai Chi I’ve ever felt has been getting my ass handed to me, over and over, by John Machado and Marcelo Garcia.


OTM: Your book The Art of Learning talks about your journey from chess to Tai Chi and BJJ. What would you say are the core similarities between chess and martial arts?

JW: People tend to answer that question with clichés. They talk about the need to think ahead, to combine strategy and tactics--those parallels are critical but obvious. To my mind, the interesting connections reside in the learning process. Both chess and the martial arts involve internalizing tremendously complex information into a sense of flow—I call this the study of numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form. I love the play between the conscious and unconscious minds in the creative moment, and for me chess and the martial arts are both about developing a rich working relationship with your intuition. We are forced to be relentlessly introspective, to take on our weaknesses and build games around our specific nuances of character. If I learned anything from my life of competition in chess and Push Hands, it’s that if you’ve swept anything under the rug in your learning process—if you haven’t taken yourself on truly and deeply—it’ll come out and destroy you when the pressure is on.

In his translation of The Vimalakirti Sutra, Robert Thurman defines wisdom as “tolerance of cognitive dissonance.” That is chess and that is the martial arts. We are learning to cultivate a peace of mind, clarity of expression, and unstoppable growth curve in the most chaotic, wildly complex, and dangerous situations imaginable.


OTM: What rank do you currently hold in BJJ and who do you train under currently?

JW: