On May 12, Vlastimil Hort died in the German town Eitorf, age 81. He was born in 1944, a few months earlier than I, and I considered him a good friend, even though I sometimes had the feeling that he acted like an older brother who is mildly surprised that the younger one is able to speak.
Of course it was not the small difference in age, but the big difference in playing strength and his enormous positive score against me that caused this attitude. Or maybe it was just my imagination.
In 1973, the German artist Hans Richter wrote an eulogy for his American colleague Alexander Calder that reminded me of Vlastimil. It went more or less like this: Originally he is a bear. He still speaks the language, which is why we sometimes find it difficult to understand him when he is in a bearish mood, but that is our fault. He dances like a bear, has the strength of a bear, and often mutters. He moves his enormous body with the lightness and grace of the dancer Pavlova.
It was not only I who saw Vlastimil as a bear, it was also Vlastimil himself. In 1989, he published a collection of chess stories titled Schwarzweisse Erzählungen at Bärenhort Verlag, which means Bear’s Lair Publishing. That publisher did not exist; the book was published by the magazine Schach-Echo, which had changed its name once in honor of Hort. So, Hort called himself a bear and over the years, I gained the impression that women in particular felt the same way.
I first read about Hort, who was still Czech at the time, in 1961, when he competed in the World Youth Championship in The Hague. He was one of the favorites, but it turned out a disappointment. On the last day of the preliminary rounds, he lost against the Dutch player Coen Zuidema, which meant that he did not qualify for final A.
Hort did not finish the tournament and returned to Prague. In the Netherlands, there was much speculation about his state of mind, but experts on Eastern European chess knew that Hort himself had no say in the matter and that the decision was entirely in the hands of the Czech Chess Federation.
An anecdote about that federation which Hort later liked to tell was about the tournament of Hastings 1967/68. The Czech federation had sent him to England with very little money, which led to him having to sleep under a tree in a London park in the December cold.
He was awakened by a police officer who, after seeing his invitation letter for Hastings, realized that Hort was alright and took him to the police station for a warmer place to sleep. The next morning, after a good prisoner’s breakfast, he was able to continue on his way. In Hastings, Hort became one of the tournament winners.
In 1968, the armies of the Soviet Union and its allies invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring. Lubosh Kavalek, who was a year younger than Hort, left the country immediately.
Hort had actually wanted to do the same, but he had a one-year-old son, Daniel, and had just separated from the mother. He wanted to stay close to his son and hoped for a long time that Daniel would join him when he emigrated to Germany. When Vlastimil did so around 1980, that did not happen.
In 1970, the English magazine Chess featured an article about Hort on its front page with the headline “A Coming World Champion?” In fact, the nearest that he would come was the candidates match against Boris Spassky in 1977 in Reykjavik.
By the way, Spassky once compared Hort’s play admiringly to a gypsy camp, where everything seems chaotic at first glance, but on closer inspection turns out to have a well-thought-out order.
It was a dramatic match. In the third game, after two draws, after Spassky had made his 40th move as White, Hort thought that he had enough time to go to the restroom before making this own 40th move. That would have been true, had it not been for an official who, while Hort was in the toilet, had locked that part of the building. Hort lost on time, but not much harm was done – his position had been lost anyway.
Then Spassky fell ill. He had to go to a hospital where his appendix was removed. Naturally Spassky asked for a time-out and naturally that was granted, though the regulations did not allow a delay as long as Spassky had wished. It seemed that Spassky would resign the match.
Then Hort, who didn’t want to win this way, saved the match by asking for a time-out himself. The final stage of the match was a dramatic illustration of the old adage that a good deed never goes unpunished.
After 14 games, the score was tied. In the penultimate game Hort had gained a big advantage with black. He could have decided the game with a few obvious moves. He saw them, and he had enough time, but, as he later said, he was physically unable to execute them. Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, he stared motionless at the chess clock’s hand until he lost on time.
Freud coined the expression am Erfolge scheitern, to fail through success. He wrote that as a doctor he had experienced that people sometimes became ill when a deep and long-cherished wish was fulfilled. It seemed as if they could not bear their happiness.
The last game of the match was a draw. Spassky had won the match and Hort coped with his grief by setting a world record in Reykjavik a few days later. He played a simultaneous exhibition against 550 opponents that lasted 24 hours and 20 minutes. His score was 477 wins, 63 draws, and 10 losses.
Of course, even after this traumatic event, Hort continued to play in tournaments which he often won. He was a regular guest in the Netherlands at the tournament in Wijk aan Zee and the IBM tournament in Amsterdam. And in Germany, he embarked on a second career as a chess storyteller, on television on the popular program Schach der Grossmeister and on the internet for the company ChessBase.
His German chess television colleague GM Helmut Pfleger was a little annoyed when he was called Märchenonkel – fairy tale uncle. I think Vlastimil, who was not averse to embellishing his stories with “facts” which often would not stand closer scrutiny, would consider this an honorary title. He liked to entertain.
Upon his death, his German wife Brigitte, whom he had married in 1995, said that Vlastimil had died from complications of diabetes, for which he had been treated for thirty years. For some years the disease had prevented him from doing the things he enjoyed: travelling, giving simuls, or just walk.
The last time I saw him was at the FishPartner rapid tournament in the Dutch town Spakenburg in 2019. His difficulty walking was obvious, but he didn’t let it get him down and he played well. In a short speech at the end, he said, “Five wins, two losses, no draws!” The latter referred to Ulf Andersson, who had offered a quick draw in all his games.
In the photos from that tournament, you can see Vlastimil smiling. He was well-liked by almost everyone in the chess world. His joyfulness was always tempered by a melancholy about things which are gone and will not return and could not have been mended anyway.
At the Hoogovens tournament in Wijk aan Zee in 1975, where Hort finished second behind Lajos Portisch, he won the Turover Brilliancy Prize, donated by the American financier Isador Samuel Turover, for the game that can be seen here in the game viewer.
Click here to view Browne-Hort, Wijk aan Zee 1975.