Jan Timman

◇The boy from Amsterdam

Jan Hendrik Timman was born in Amsterdam on 14 December 1951 and grew up inside the small but proud Dutch chess tradition that Max Euwe had carried to a world title. In 1974 Timman earned the grandmaster title, becoming only the third Dutch grandmaster in history, after Euwe and Jan Hein Donner.

His family moved to Delft when he was six months old, and he grew up there; his father worked at the University of Technology in Delft. In Timman's Titans (2016) he wrote that he "learned the rules of chess when I was eight years old", taught by his father and his elder brother Ton, who played through Euwe's games at home. In December 1962 the two brothers played in a Euwe simultaneous display in The Hague. When Ton, standing better, offered a draw, Euwe declined: "No, because you won’t get many more chances to play against me." Ton won. Jan reached a queen ending and accepted Euwe's draw offer.

In the preface to The Art of the Endgame, Timman recalled building Lego cities and castles as a child, then becoming absorbed in Euwe's chess books. Herbstman's book on endgame studies introduced him to a form of chess in which the competition gave way to scientific and artistic questions. He began composing studies in the early 1970s, just after finishing secondary school.

His father, an applied mathematician, recognized a similar commitment in his son's chess. In Studies and Games, Timman recalled his father comparing the time he spent on chess during his school years with his own devotion to mathematics. His father died suddenly in his sleep in 1975, shortly before a planned two-game match between Timman and Euwe in Hilversum, and Timman withdrew from the match.

Timman also described a failed experiment in preparation in the preface to The Art of Chess Analysis. Before the Amsterdam IBM tournament in 1971, he and Hans Böhm spent three months in the Friesland countryside with chess books and tracksuits, following Botvinnik's advice about fitness and fresh air. He lost his first five games, feeling too energetic to sit still. Returning to his usual way of life helped him recover; his conclusion was that an important tournament was a poor moment to change his normal routine.

At home he had no rival. Timman won the Dutch Championship nine times, and from his first years on the international circuit it was clear that the Netherlands had produced a player who would lead the world's elite, not just make up the numbers.

◇The Best of the West

Through the late 1970s and into the 1990s, Timman was the strongest player outside the Soviet Union, and the chess world gave him a name to match: the Best of the West. By January 1982 he stood second in the world rankings, behind only Anatoly Karpov, and his rating peaked at 2680 in January 1990 — figures that placed him squarely among a handful of genuine title contenders.

His second grandmaster norm came at Hastings 1973/74, where he shared first place with Tal and two others. He needed 2½ points from his last three games, and the day before their game Tal told him he would accept any draw Timman offered in the first twenty moves. Timman declined, because "it seemed necessary to fight in every game if you wanted to achieve such a high score". He drew with Tal and won his last two games. He called Bugojno 1978, where he finished third, a point behind Karpov and Spassky, and beat Karpov for the first time, "my first great tournament success".

One of his strongest runs came at Mar del Plata in February 1982. Kasparov records in My Great Predecessors, Part V that Timman won eight successive games from the third round, including a win with Black against Karpov. His 9½/13 put him a point and a half ahead of Portisch; Karpov, Polugayevsky, and Seirawan shared third.

The tournament wins came thick and fast: Hastings, Wijk aan Zee in 1981 and 1985, Bugojno in 1984, Linares in 1988 and many more over two decades. Perhaps the most satisfying came at the 1991 Immopar rapid in Paris, a knockout in which he beat Gata Kamsky, Karpov, Viswanathan Anand and Garry Kasparov one after another, four of the strongest players in the world.

◇A fighter in the mould of Lasker

Timman played chess the hard way, on purpose. Where others steered toward their own comfort, he sought out an opponent's strongest ground and met him there, carrying a wide and varied opening repertoire at a time when such breadth was still unusual at the top. Raymond Keene called him "a fighter, in the mould of Emanuel Lasker."

Yasser Seirawan observed that this fearlessness — a readiness to plunge into the most complicated positions — cost Timman games that a more cautious man would have drawn, but it made him a deeply feared competitor: nobody, Seirawan noted, enjoys being beaten from their own favourite positions. The boldness was the point; it was how Timman wrung beauty and danger out of the board.

His own accounts bear this out. At Montreal 1979, when Spassky offered a draw as soon as the clocks were started, Timman, who had Black, answered that he did not think "a draw without a struggle" would help either of them back into the tournament; the game was fought out to a draw. In KRO matches in Hilversum, first Lajos Portisch and later Tal offered to draw the last two games after Timman had lost the fourth. He refused both times: "I couldn’t do it, and didn’t want to." He won the match against Portisch and lost the one against Tal.

◇The road to the title

The route included a painful setback at the Rio de Janeiro Interzonal in 1979. A final-round draw against Garcia left him outside the Candidates. In Studies and Games, Timman described waiting five months before he could face the analysis again. He eventually concluded that the decisive mistake came from impatience and a lack of discipline, rather than nerves.

Twice Timman fought to the very edge of the world title. He won the Taxco Interzonal in 1985, then shared fourth place with Tal in the Montpellier Candidates tournament; a 3–3 tie in their six-game playoff was enough for him on tie-break. In the next cycle he beat Valery Salov, Lajos Portisch and Jonathan Speelman to meet Karpov in the 1990 Candidates final in Kuala Lumpur, which he lost. In the cycle after that he defeated Robert Hübner, Viktor Korchnoi and Artur Yusupov before falling to Nigel Short in the decisive Candidates match.

Then history handed him the chance directly. When Kasparov and Short broke away to play their 1993 title match outside FIDE, the federation staged its own World Championship match between Karpov and Timman. A 24-game match with Karpov was, he wrote, "something I couldn’t have dreamed of after my defeat by Short", though he was criticized in the Dutch press for agreeing to play. A planned second leg in Oman fell through, and the match was played in Zwolle, Arnhem, Amsterdam and Jakarta. Karpov won 12½–8½. Karpov later named the fourteenth game, in which Timman missed a clear win with Black, as the decisive one; Timman agreed, and lost the next two games.

By Timman's count they played 91 games between 1967 and 2003, not counting rapid and blitz, the first at the European junior championship in Groningen when he had just turned sixteen: "He won 28 games, I won 8, with 55 draws." His own explanation: "Too often, it happened that I failed to keep a cool head during the critical stage of the game."

◇Among the champions

As a teenager, Timman wrote, he "had a mythical admiration for Fischer, but Botvinnik was my teacher"; he found Botvinnik's annotated games more instructive than anything else he read. He came to know Botvinnik in 1988, when he and the Dutch businessman Bessel Kok "determined the policy" of the Grandmasters Association (GMA). At a dinner in Moscow, after Timman said in a speech that Botvinnik had been his great example, Botvinnik stood up and thanked him in Dutch. In early 1989 Timman and Kok negotiated a draft agreement between the GMA and FIDE.

He met Bobby Fischer in May 1990, when Kok invited Fischer to Brussels with Spassky's help. Fischer spent hours showing him positions on a pocket chess set. Over dinner Spassky mentioned Stalin, and Fischer remarked, "Under him, at least you knew where you stood". Timman answered, "It’s just that you didn’t stand for long", and Fischer "laughed heartily at this."

◇The pen and the studies

Away from the board, Timman shaped how the game was written about. As one of the chief editors of New In Chess, he helped make it the leading magazine for serious players, and his own books became classics: The Art of Chess Analysis (1980) is one of the modern standards, and Timman's Titans (2016), his portraits of the world champions from Alekhine to Kasparov, won the English Chess Federation's Book of the Year award. In 1972 he stayed away from Reykjavik to write a book on the Fischer–Spassky match, analysing for a little more than a month in an empty house in Wageningen that his publisher, Wim Andriessen, had bought; Euwe wrote the part on the match's prehistory, and the English edition appeared as Fischer World Champion.

Composition accompanied his playing career. He later devoted more time to endgame studies, which had fascinated him since youth. He composed prolifically, many of his studies winning awards, and gathered them in works such as The Art of the Endgame and Timman's Studies. In 2022 he was recognized as a FIDE Master of Chess Composition, one of the strongest practical players ever to excel at composition. He remained an artist of the sixty-four squares until his death in February 2026.

In 100 Endgame Studies You Must Know (2024) he recalled solving a Mattison pawn study given to him as an exercise when he was eleven, and called Leonid Kubbel his favourite composer. Pal Benko, with whom he exchanged ideas about studies in the 1970s and 1980s, "always stimulated me to continue composing." Timman composed one study in five days and a year later sent it to the 2019 jubilee tourney for Benko's 90th birthday; it is, he wrote, "probably my best study."

The Art of the Endgame explains how he worked backward from a final position with a hidden point, looking for the moves that could lead to it. Computers helped him find defects, but he also used them to repair studies while preserving their ideas. "An impressive work of art that has been damaged, must be repaired with great care," he wrote in the preface.

Some ideas took years to finish. In 1992, in southern France, Tim Krabbé showed him a scheme that doubled a pawn-stopping device known as the Prokes maneuver. Timman could not make it work correctly; the versions he published in the 1990s proved unsound. The Art of the Endgame records their eventual successful collaboration in 2010: "Not until 18 years later did I manage to make a good, solid version."