Vlastimil Hort, 1944-2025

Another legend of 20th century chess passes away.

This has not been a good year for the generation of players who were at or fighting for the top of world chess from the 1950s or ‘60s through the 1980s. First Robert Hübner passed away on January 5, then Boris Spassky on February 27, then Fridrik Olafsson on April 4, and now the great Czech-German grandmaster Vlastimil Hort has died as well. He passed away a week ago, on May 12, at the age of 81.

At his peak he was #6 in the world, and qualified for the Candidates matches in 1977, losing a heartbreaker to Spassky. The match was neck and neck, and Hort could have won the match a couple of different ways. First, Spassky fell ill during the match and ran out of timeouts, but Hort used one of his own timeouts so Spassky could recuperate. Second, Hort was completely winning in the penultimate game but lost on time - apparently not in a desperate time scramble but simply forgetting about the clock. (A terrible psychological blow, but Hort found an amusing means of therapy: he played a 600+ board simul (!!) the day after the match ended, then a world record, so he would get the match with Spassky out of his mind.

He continued to play for many years and was also known as a wonderful personality beloved by the entire chess world. He was a very solid player who didn’t win a lot of games against the world’s absolute elite, but as a rule they didn’t beat him very often, either. He continued to play at quite a reasonable level into his 60s and even 70s, defeating the then-2700 rated Nigel Short when he was 68 and managing a draw with Pentala Harikrishna, also over 2700 at the time, when he was 73. Not bad, to put it mildly.

Those interested in discovering more about this 20th century great have a number of fine resources at your disposal. In addition to ChessBase’s obituary there’s this page, with links to many more (s)Hort stories recounting moments from his career, people he has met, and so on. (This page in particular offers links to his episode of Ben Johnson’s Perpetual Chess Podcast - always worth a listen.) He wrote a recent book called My Chess Stories (out of print on Amazon but probably available somewhere) and recorded a DVD (now available as a download) for ChessBase called “Facing the World Champions”.

There are undoubtedly many more sites of interest for those wanting to see more of his work. I’ll close with a link to ten of his games, with my comments - have a look.

My condolences to his family and friends. Rest in peace.