The World’s Slowest Race: Inside the Cigar Smoking World Championship

Most cigar smokers have probably never tried to smoke a cigar as slowly as humanly possible.

There is, however, an entire international competition built around exactly that.

The Cigar Smoking World Championship, or CSWC, has a wonderfully simple objective: every competitor receives the same cigar, lights it once, and tries to keep it burning longer than everyone else.

No relighting. No rushing. No second chances.

It has been called the slowest race in the world, and after seeing one up close, that description is indeed surprisingly accurate.

So, how does a slow smoking competition actually work?

At first glance, it sounds easy.

Take a cigar. Smoke it slowly. Last person still smoking wins.

The reality is considerably more complicated, and at the same time, not at all.

Every competitor starts with the same official competition cigar and essentially the same equipment. There is limited time to prepare and light the cigar, and once the initial light is over, you cannot relight it.

If your cigar goes out, your race is over.

That creates the central problem of slow smoking:

You need to smoke slowly enough to preserve the cigar, but often enough to keep it alive.

Every puff becomes a calculation.

Too aggressive and you consume precious tobacco unnecessarily. Wait a little too long and the ember can quietly disappear.

At the highest level, the difference between the two can be seconds.

And then come the rules

Keeping the cigar lit is only part of the challenge.

During the competition, you cannot blow on the cigar from the outside, blow through it to manipulate the burn, or wet it. The cigar must remain in your hand and visible to the judges. For the first five minutes, competitors are not even allowed to talk or drink.

Then there is the ash.

Keeping a long ash isn't merely for photographs. Under CSWC rules, losing or deliberately removing your first ash during the opening 40 minutes results in a time penalty. The earlier it falls, the harsher the penalty. After 40 minutes, the ash can be removed without that deduction.

So while you're already trying to maintain the slowest possible burn, you're also trying not to disturb a steadily growing column of ash.

And finally, there is the competition ring.

Unlike the normal decorative cigar band, the competition ring marks the limit of how far the cigar may be smoked. Its position is controlled so that every competitor receives essentially the same amount of cigar to work with.

Get too close and things become interesting.

Burning the competition ring ends your smoking time and carries a 15-minute penalty. At that point, after perhaps two hours of careful smoking, a few millimetres can make a very large difference.

The cigar built for the job

For the current championship, everyone competes with the Oliva CSWC Mareva.

It measures 5 1/8 inches (around 129 mm), with a 42 ring gauge. The filler and binder are Nicaraguan, while the wrapper comes from Ecuador. 

Oliva developed the cigar specifically with the championship in mind.

That matters because consistency becomes enormously important when dozens of people are competing against the same clock. The cigar needs a controlled draw, predictable combustion and ash strong enough to survive the early stages of the competition.

Even then, it isn't completely predictable.

During early testing of the Oliva Mareva, CSWC noted that different sections of the cigar burned at different rates, including a comparatively faster opening section. The ash, meanwhile, was deliberately praised for its ability to hold together.

In normal cigar smoking, those differences might simply be part of the experience.

Here, competitors have to adapt to them.

How slow is slow?

A normal Mareva is not exactly an all-afternoon cigar.

But in the hands of an elite slow smoker, it can become one.

The 2025 World Championship was won by Poland’s Tomasz Żołądkiewicz with a time of 2 hours, 46 minutes and 10 seconds.

The all-time world record belongs to Poland’s Klaudia Ide, who kept a Rocky Patel CSWC competition cigar burning for an extraordinary 3 hours, 53 minutes and 9 seconds in 2023.

Nearly four hours.

From one single, small-sized cigar.

That puts the difference between casually smoking a cigar and competing with one into perspective.

The best competitors aren't simply taking long pauses between normal puffs. They are controlling the burn on the edge of extinction for hours, repeatedly giving the cigar just enough attention to keep the burn alive without allowing it to accelerate.

It is less about smoking more.

It is about smoking as little as possible without stopping.

Seeing it from the judges' side in Tallinn

Two weeks ago, that slowest race in the world came to Tallinn once again. All the pictures in this blog post is from this specific event.

The 14th Tallinn Cigar Weekend took place on August 15–16, with the Slow Smoking Championship held in the heart of Tallinn's Old Town. The competition formed part of the Nordic Qualification Tournament for the Cigar Smoking World Championship.

This time SISUMAN had a slightly different view of the competition.

Axel joined the event as a support judge, watching the race from the other side of the table.

Judging might sound like the easier job until you understand how small the margins become.

Was the cigar still burning? Did the ash fall? Was the cigar kept visible? Did the burn reach the competition ring? When competitors are separated by minutes, or potentially seconds, those decisions matter.

And after an afternoon of extremely slow smoking, this year's title in Tallinn went across the Gulf to Finland.

A competition that is really about slowing down

Perhaps the strangest thing about the Cigar Smoking World Championship is that beneath all the rules, timers and competition, it exaggerates something that already makes cigars unusual.

You cannot really hurry a cigar.

Slow smoking simply takes that principle to its logical extreme.

For a couple of hours, nothing else matters except an ember a few millimetres wide. You watch it, manage it, wait, and try very hard not to do too much.

What initially sounds like a slightly ridiculous competition turns out to require an impressive amount of patience, precision and concentration.

And yes, people take it very seriously.

Would we recommend trying to turn every cigar you smoke into a three-hour battle against combustion?

Probably not.

But if someone ever asks whether competitive cigar smoking really exists, the answer is absolutely yes.

And the goal is beautifully simple:

Be the last one smoking.