Jan Timman obituary: grandmaster hailed as ‘the best of the West’

Indeed, in his 2017 book Timman’s Titans, he suggested that had he been a young man in the modern era, he never would have become a professional chess player at all. You can no longer “live on talent alone” because “chess is now ruled by a computer”, he lamented.

In the last decade or so of his life he occasionally used a computer for match preparation as it “makes the whole process a lot easier”. Yet he never did so with any pleasure, for it diminished the noble if less predictable qualities of the human brain.

“Chess players nowadays when they are 20 years old, their life looks very tidy, very organised,” he noted in contrast to his own freewheeling approach as a young player half a century earlier. Playing chess for a living offered “a way to travel from one country to another with no school desks or college halls, no pressure to get up early, no duty to give account for anything. You are your own boss, governed only by your own abilities.”

Paraphrasing the cricket writer CLR James, Timman’s approach was “What do they know of chess who only chess know?” and he had a broad hinterland of other interests. He loved blues and rock music and in his early days with his flowing locks and casual dress he looked more like he was auditioning for the Rolling Stones than a candidate to become a grandmaster. He wrote essays on Jorge Luis Borges and Dostoevsky and during international tournaments would visit museums and galleries rather than cloistering himself in his room puzzling over openings and end games.

Timman was a bon-vivant whose bohemian credo was “do what you feel like’’. His enjoyment of a drink or three led to speculation that he might have had a better chance of winning the world title if he had been more abstemious, but he rejected the idea and pointed out that he had tried it once during a tournament in 1971. “We lived like health freaks — no alcohol, no narcotics and tough physical training. It didn’t work at all. I lost my first five games,” he recalled. “So I decided to make a U-turn. My nights were full of alcohol abuse again and this had a positive effect on my play.”

His second wife, Geertje Dirkse, survives him. She was 23 years his junior but they bonded over a shared love of Bob Dylan’s songs and married in 2003. He is further survived by a son and a daughter from his first marriage to Ilse-Marie Dorff, which ended in divorce.

Jan Hendrik Timman was born in 1951 in Amsterdam, the third of four children to Anna and Reinier Timman, both of whom were mathematicians. He grew up in Delft, where his father was a university professor and as a child watched his older brother Ton playing chess, although he was more interested in playing Monopoly. He only took up chess after striking a deal with Ton in which his brother agreed to play five games of Monopoly in return for one game of chess. His brother, who attained tournament standard himself, died in 2014, and Jan remained ever grateful to him as his first teacher and the first to see his talent.

After joining his local chess club, at 14 he became the youngest ever player to win the Dutch under-20 championship. Two years later he came third in the 1967 World Youth Championship. On leaving school in 1970, he moved to Amsterdam to read maths at university on his father’s insistence — yet he never enrolled and instead found a bursary that sent him to the Soviet Union to train under the Russian grandmaster Eduard Gufeld.

Within a year he had earned the title “international master” and by 23 he was a grandmaster, the second-youngest to earn the title at the time. Even a few weeks in jail in 1975, when he missed the deadline to present himself for military service, could not stop his rise up the rankings. Three years later he scored his first victory over Karpov, the reigning world champion, although the Russian went on to win the overall tournament.

By 1982 he was ranked second in the world behind Karpov, but both of them were about to be overtaken by Kasparov. Timman beat Kasparov in a rapid tournament in 1991 but generally failed to gain the upper hand over the new world champion.

However, in 1993 after the chess world had split into two rival camps, with the long-established governing body Fide challenged by the breakaway Professional Chess Association, Timman was granted one final tilt at the world championship.

For leading the breakaway, Kasparov and the Englishman Nigel Short had been stripped of their first and second world rankings by Fide. While they competed for the new PCA title in a tournament sponsored by The Times, Timman found himself facing the former world champion Karpov once more for the Fide title. As usual Karpov emerged the victor; over the years the two played each other 95 times, with 28 wins for Karpov, nine for Timman, and 58 draws.

Although past his peak and no longer even “the best of the West’’, he continued to play tournaments well into the 2000s and also became a prolific author of chess books.

It was often said that Timman was unfortunate to have played in an era when Karpov and Kasparov were so dominant. Yet he admitted that he would not have attained the level he did without the high bar set by the two Russians.

“I never got frustrated that I didn’t succeed in becoming world champion,” he told a Dutch newspaper in 2012. “The pursuit of becoming one always preoccupied me more.”

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