Jan Timman, 1951-2026

Grandmaster Jan Timman, a former world No. 2, a three-time world championship candidate and nine-time Dutch champion, died Thursday. He was 74.

photo Burt Hochberg

Born in Amsterdam, Timman first made his mark at age 15, finishing third in the World Junior Championship. He became the Netherlands’ third grandmaster in 1974.

By the 1980s, he was often referred to as the “Best of the West,” winning international tournaments alongside the Soviets’ best. Some of his most impressive results included first places in the IBM tournament of 1981; the Wijk aan Zee tournaments (now known as Tata Steel) in 1981 and 1985, and the 1988 edition of the Linares supertournament.

He also won two interzonals — Taxco in 1985 and Tilburg in 1987. He was second on the January 1982 FIDE rating list to World Champion Anatoly Karpov.

Timman remained a strong player for years after that: He won the 1991 Immopar knockout rapid tournament, taking out GM Gata Kamsky and past, present and future world champions Viswanathan Anand, Karpov and Garry Kasparov along the way. He also reached the Candidates final in 1993; when Kasparov and challenger GM Nigel Short split with FIDE and contested a match under private auspices in London, Timman and Karpov played for the FIDE World Championship.

He represented the Netherlands in 13 Olympiads, winning the Board 1 gold medal in 1976. Timman also played on the gold medal-winning team in the European Team Championships in 2005; he played in the Dutch Championship in 2024, and appears to have last played in a Dutch team tournament last year.

“I will play until I feel that I don’t play well anymore,” Timman told Chess.com’s Peter Doggers in 2012. “Of course I will sometimes play a bad game, this will happen for sure. If you're getting older, you'll have bad days more and more. But as long as I can play good games, I will certainly enjoy doing this.”

Timman was known for having said in recent years that if he were young today he would not have become a professional chessplayer. He told the Dutch newspaper NRC in 2023 that the influx of information had sapped the fun from the game.

Young players “just sit behind computers all day,” Timman said. Perhaps ironically, the work that computers do actually created more work for the professional player. “It’s not just traveling around and having a fun life, like I did. It was a hippie life, but with a purpose.”

Timman wrote extensively on chess and was an editor of the essential Dutch magazine New in Chess. His first book, 1980’s The Art of Chess Analysis, was a collection of games (some played by him) with his dense notes, written while he was growing in strength and published while he was still becoming one of the world's top players. For an amateur at the time, the book’s lack of positional generalizations and easy-to-remember principles served as a sobering indication in the pre-computer age how deeply strong players analyzed positions both at the board and after the game.

from the US Chess archives

Some of Timman’s best work was on his own games: Chess the Adventurous Way (1994); Studies and Games (1996; translated from the 1983 Schaakwerk); and Timman’s Triumphs: My 100 Best Games (2020). His encounters with the world champions are further recounted in the 2016 Timman’s Titans, which was given a glowing review by John Hartmann in his days as a Chess Life columnist.

Other titles included Fischer World Champion!, a recounting of the 1972 World Championship; Curaçao 1962: The Battle of Minds That Shook the Chess World, about the infamous 1962 Candidates Tournament that led Fischer to write the earthshaking piece “The Russians Have Fixed World Chess,” and Botvinnik’s Secret Games, which unearthed a trove of games from private training matches the Soviet legend played as world champion. He also wrote a collection of games of former World Champion Max Euwe, who is considered to be Timman’s great predecessor in Dutch chess.

Timman’s appreciation of the game included the artistry of chess: He was one of the strongest players to become a serious chess composer, gaining the title of FIDE Master of Chess Composition in 2022, and wrote several books on chess problems and studies. His first, Studies and Games, came out in 1996, written just a few years after his match with Karpov. His works also included The Art of the Endgame: My Journeys in the Magical World of Endgame Studies in 2011 and 100 Endgame Studies You Must Know in 2022. His final book, Timman’s Studies: My Collected Endgame Studies and Their Origins, came out late last year.

While Timman was obviously a strong and practical player, his deep analysis and love of composition spoke to a desire to seek the absolute truth about a position, and the maximum beauty from the pieces. “I think I am a good fighter,” he told Doggers, “but I’m also fascinated by perfection.” He told the New in Chess podcast last year that Timman’s Studies included improvements on studies he had already won prizes for.

For all of this, Timman was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame last October. He wasn’t at the ceremony.

“I can't complain,” Timman told Doggers in 2012. “I was very successful in the World Championship cycle; I reached high positions in the world rankings … it’s fine. I think I got all, or almost all, there was to get out of my career.”