Timman: Chess Legend & Enduring Skill

• Rens Went

  editor NOS Sport

For a lifetime, Jan Timman had his fingers on antique chess pieces. You can’t get enough of that feeling. Yet the 74-year-old grandmaster retired this year. In silence. The mind and body struggle.

Six hours of being completely absorbed in a game is too exhausting. “Long-term concentration decreases as you get older. The physical game has become too demanding.”

That’s not a bad thing and Timman doesn’t want his chess pension to be a big deal in the newspapers either. Although he played for a particularly long time, including his surprising return to the National Championships last year. “Many of my peers quit years ago.”

Timman belonged to Anatoli Karpov’s generation, but also met older and younger Russians such as Boris Spassky and Garri Kasparov. Among those world famous Soviet chess players was the Dutch in the 1970s and 1980s ‘The best of the West‘, even number two in the world for a while.

Physically it is difficult, but with memory it is at the age of 74 nothing wrong. Timman replays his best victory for you. Move by move. From 1982 against Karpov, to whom Timman lost the battle for the world title in 1993.

“What you leave behind are the games you played. When I think of Botvinnik or Capablanca, I think of the games they played, that is their legacy. With that you leave a character of yourself in the sport.”

Timman’s chess character lies in the endgame, the final phase of a game in which the smallest mistake is fatal. He wrote prize-winning books about his fascination. In his recent 100 endgame studies you need to know Timman explores the art in an almost “scientific” way.

Playing long, classical games is no longer possible, but writing about chess certainly is. Timman still publishes “an extensive article” eight times a year in the leading chess magazine New In Chess.

“I’m currently writing a book about my childhood.” Also about his childhood in Delft, where he grew up with two mathematician parents. He is still looking for a publisher. “My father also wanted me to become a mathematician. But I was not very fond of such a university life, because I had to get up early. A chess life was much freer.”

Hanging above the keyboard, old chess memories sometimes come back. Sometimes he is surprised by the current chess world. But he keeps track of everything intensively “in peace and quiet”.

Except for those short, online games. Timman doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t play them, he doesn’t follow them. Never did either. “You have to play fast and then the level is not that high.”

Yet the computer, as a source of information and because of the rise of online chess, has become indispensable for the game. And that had consequences. “Chess players are getting younger and younger because they can use the computer.”

“When I was about twelve, I couldn’t improve as quickly as today’s young generation, who are making very rapid progress thanks to computers.”

This changes the game, says Timman, who moves through modern society without his own mobile phone. He notices: the chess computer determines a lot.

Timman: “I used to follow what the great chess players wrote about their own games. I thought that was the most interesting teaching material. Nowadays I think the youngest generation thinks differently about it. They mainly follow what the computer finds. That has been a kind of change in chess.”

A touch of romance has disappeared from chess, says Timman. “It’s a completely different kind of activity now. There used to be a lot of bohemians. Nowadays they are decent people who can use computers well. The liveliness of tournaments has disappeared a bit.”

Digitization brought chess an audience of billions, but also grim. Cheating online is a serious threat to the sport, Timman notes. Accusations are easily made and difficult to prove. The threat is less great in physical tournaments.

The liveliness that Timman talks about was mainly found in some Soviet chess players in his time. When they, along with astronauts, ballet dancers and actors, belonged to the country’s intellectual elite. “They had good ways of thinking and speaking. Great sense of humor too. Not members of the Communist Party. The slightly more free-spirited ones.”

A true friendship arose with Spassky, who died in early 2025. The bond was also strong with rival Karpov.

“The last time I spoke to Karpov in detail was in Murmansk, in 2016. We played a short match. We talked about everything, not so much chess. But about the political problems of the world, and Ukraine was of course also worrying at that time.”

Timman built up an impeccable reputation among the Russians in 56 years from the age of seventeen. In our own country, first comes world champion Max Euwe. Then quickly Timman.

And where does Anish Giri stand, the Dutchman who will play chess next spring for a place in the world title battle?

If Giri plays like he did last year, Timman sees opportunities for him in that candidates tournament. Many highly ranked chess players are missing. In fact, a second Dutch world champion is not excluded, Timman believes. Giri must maintain that level.

“Giri knows very well how to strategically take advantage when his opponent has weak pawns or weak squares. That requires insight and pattern recognition. He is also very strong in the endgame.”

Who knows, Timman’s endgame studies might come in handy. The books are still selling well. “Digital developments have not meant that chess books, just like written literature, have become redundant. There is a lot about chess on the internet, but those books remain worthwhile.”

The last remnants of tangible romance of books and chess pieces will not fade away quickly anyway. You can easily transform Timman’s house into a chess museum.

“I have a whole collection of chess games at home. About thirty. Also very old. In many different styles. From the nineteenth century. In display cases.”

They are early Victorian and Chinese. With red and white sometimes very detailed rooks and horses. Made of wood, bone and ivory. “Chess books form a separate collection. There are approximately 2,500 of them. They are all in the attic.”