A Posthumous Reflection on Jan Timman
After the death of Jan Timman, Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, editor of New in Chess, the magazine in which Jan wrote a lengthy article for every issue, spoke on the website of NOS – a Dutch broadcasting foundation – about Jan’s dedication to his work:
“A moving moment for me was that even on his deathbed, he wrote a backup column for the upcoming issue. So that we wouldn’t have any problems with the next issue. He wrote that column when he heard the news of his illness, seven months ago. He said, ‘Then at least you’ll have something, should I have to skip one.’ The epitome of his diligence and sense of duty.”
Written on his deathbed, that seemed a bit overly dramatic to me, until I saw that while the column may have been conceived seven months earlier, it had been updated much later.
The article was about the decline of Russian chess, and the headline was “Every Russian schoolboy knew...” In the past tense. The phrase “every Russian schoolboy knows” had long been widely used when discussing the legendary system of chess education in the Soviet Union.
Some writers liked to use the phrase precisely when discussing highly complex matters, things you’d almost have to be a genius to understand, or at least be as smart as that writer.
The message from NIC was that now Russian schoolboys no longer know it, because the Pioneer Palaces where they learned it have been closed. Timman wrote in his article that in 1971, when FIDE published the first global rating list, only three players from outside the Soviet Union were in the top ten of the rankings: Fischer, Larsen, and Portisch. It stayed that way for a while.
Now there isn’t a single Russian in the top twenty, whether they live inside or outside Russia. Timman grew up in a chess world where the Russians Botvinnik, Spassky and Karpov and the Latvian Tal were the great heroes. I couldn’t help but feel that in his farewell article, he described the decline of Russian chess as a metaphor for his own impending death.
He saw two glimmers of hope for Russian chess: Andrei Esipenko, 23 years old and ranked 33rd in the world, and Volodar Murzin, 19 years old and ranked 67th.
Put this way, it may seem as if Jan had to dig quite deep, but actually Murzin became world rapid chess champion in 2024, and Esipenko qualified for the Candidates’ Tournament, which began in Cyprus at the end of March.
The game below, lively and exciting until the very end, is between two players who will meet again in that Candidates’ Tournament. I have a secret list of participants who, in my opinion, have no chance of winning it, and it will come as no surprise that my compatriot Anish Giri is definitely not on that list of underdogs.
The game in the viewer between Esipenko and Giri was played in Sochi in 2017 during the Russian Team Championship. Less than ten years ago, but it was a different world then, because it would be unthinkable now for a top Dutch player to participate in the Russian Team Championship,
Giri played for Siberia-Sirius, a star-studded team sponsored by Siberian oil and led by former world champion Vladimir Kramnik; the team won every match.
What was the Dutch ace Giri doing there? He was born in St. Petersburg in 1994, lived with his Nepalese father and Russian mother in Japan from 2002 to 2008, when the family moved to the Netherlands. He is married to the Georgian International Master Sopiko Guramishvili and lives in the Dutch city The Hague. He is a man of the world.
Click here to view Episenko-Giri, Russian Team Ch., Sochi 2017