Jan Timman
14 December 1951 - 18 February 2026
In the photo below, we are playing in the 1964 Dutch U20 Championship in Rotterdam. Jan was 12 and I was 19. He seems to be enjoying himself and I may be showing a slight surprise at seeing this little boy in our tournament of almost-adults.
Leo Kerkhoff from Rotterdam became champion that year. I don’t remember how the game between Timman and me ended, and I couldn’t find it either. He scored well there; that I could gather from the database.
Players without their own lodging in Rotterdam were accommodated in a youth hostel where we had to help with the daily dishwashing. So, Leo Kerkhoff, who as a Rotterdam native escaped this labor service, had a slight advantage over the rest, and I wonder if that was also true for Jan. Probably so. He lived with his parents in Delft, a town quite near to Rotterdam, and it stands to reason that they dropped him off and picked him up every day. On the other hand, I had the advantage of seven more years of chess experience.
I had forgotten about this 1964 game until a friend sent me that picture. Something like that would never have happened to Jan, with his fabulous memory.
People who visited him were often amazed that he could replay games from decades earlier from memory. It is conceivable that he still remembered all the moves from our game in 1964, but I can no longer ask him, just as so many other things are no longer possible.
I don’t think I was ever jealous that Jan became a stronger chess player than I. In the 1970s, he became one of the strongest players in the world, which was a wonderful natural phenomenon that you just had to accept. Looking back, I think I may have been jealous sometimes of the decisiveness of his career choice.
I studied mathematics, and two years before graduating I had a moment of enlightenment in the shower of a hotel room in Lugano during the 1968 Olympiad. I realized then that it wasn’t necessary at all to take a job, which would force me to use an alarm clock and wake up early. Nevertheless, I continued with my studies because I had a love for mathematics and a lot of respect for my professors and because it gave you a deferment from military service. Graduating in mathematics was also a kind of timid insurance against bad chess times.
Such timidity was foreign to Jan. When he finished school in 1970, he enrolled at the University of Amsterdam to study mathematics. That was in accordance with the wish of his father Reinier, who was himself a professor of mathematics in Delft. Jan was good at mathematics, and he wanted to be enrolled so he could get a student room and also a military deferment.
It seems that the enrollment did not go through because he had forgotten a form, which can be seen as a Freudian slip. In any case, to my knowledge, he never attended a lecture. The issue of military service resolved itself.
In 1975 he became Dutch champion in Leeuwarden. The military police waited discreetly until after the award ceremony, then picked him up and took him to the Nieuwersluis disciplinary center because he had left calls for service unanswered for years, trusting Mr. Micawber’s famous motto “something will turn up.” They couldn’t easily catch him because he traveled a lot.
Jan was allowed to walk freely around the military grounds in Nieuwersluis and a few weeks later he was released, because it had been decided in high circles that the fatherland would benefit more from the chess player than from the soldier Timman.
“Best of the West” was his nickname. In his book Timman’s Triumphs he accurately notes the period for which this was true: from 1981 to 1985, when at first he was second in the world rankings behind Anatoly Karpov and then third behind Karpov and Garry Kasparov.
It took him some time to get to play a match for the world championship. That was in 1993 against Karpov, a title match that didn’t shine so brightly at the time because Kasparov had temporarily withdrawn from FIDE and started his own federation
It has been pointed out that the term “Best of the West” actually did Jan an injustice, because it left open the possibility that there were many players in the East higher in the rankings. At the time, there were only two
Timman had been ill for several months, but his death on Wednesday, February 18, still came as an unexpected shock. When I heard the news on the radio the next morning, I briefly hoped it was a mistake.
In addition to being a great chess player, he was also an exceptionally productive writer and an acclaimed composer of endgame studies. According to Yochanan Afek, an expert in the field, Jan created about 500 studies. And not least, he was also a very pleasant person, who had strong convictions but never sought conflict. About a rival who did, he said: “He’s a bit crazy, isn’t he?”
In the week after his death I received many condolences, on the street and even from people who didn’t play chess but realized that a very special person had passed away.
At the funeral, I spoke to Genna Sosonko, who told me that he corresponded with a Russian friend who lived in Tbilisi, Georgia and had asked him if Jan would get a state funeral. But regrettably, that is not the Dutch way.
Perhaps I’m not counting perfectly, but I think that Timman and Karpov had played 117 games against each other, rapid and blitz included. Nowhere near as many as the epic struggles between Karpov and Kasparov, but in both cases, you could almost call it a marriage. Timman and Kortchnoi have a good score between themselves too, with 79 games.
Sweat almost breaks out when I’m thinking about these exertions, but in the game viewer you’ll find a lightweight game from a heavyweight tournament. Jan didn’t include it in Timman's Triumphs and that is understandable, because you certainly can’t say that this is one of his hundred best games. But it is certainly charming.
Click here to view Timman-Kortchnoi, Tilburg 1991