Vlastimil Hort, a Memorably Selfless Chess Grandmaster, Dies at 81

New York Times

20-05-2025

In the winter of 1977, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Vlastimil Hort, a Czech grandmaster ranked No. 6 in the world, was facing off against Boris Spassky, the Russian former world chess champion who had lost to Bobby Fischer in the same city five years earlier.
The match was a best-of-12 quarterfinal, whose winner would be one step closer to the top title in chess. After 12 games, they were tied, prompting a two-game playoff.
Then Mr. Spassky fell seriously ill. He was taken to the hospital, and his appendix was removed. According to the rules, he was entitled to three postponements of three days each. He took them all, but was still too unwell to play.
Mr. Spassky would have to forfeit, meaning Mr. Hort would advance to the semifinals.
Then Mr. Hort did something unexpected. To give Mr. Spassky a chance to continue to compete, Mr. Hort requested a three-day timeout, which was granted. It was a choice seen for decades as one of the greatest acts of sportsmanship in the history of the game, and it ended up costing Mr. Hort the match.
By the end of the timeout, Mr. Spassky could resume play, and after Games 13 and 14 were drawn, another two-game playoff was needed. In Game 15, Mr. Hort reached a winning position, but he froze. His time expired before he had made the required number of moves, thus forfeiting the game. After the next game ended in a tie, Mr. Spassky was declared the winner of the match.
Mr. Hort lost his chance to play for the world championship and never qualified again.
He died on May 12 at his home in Eitorf, Germany, near Bonn. He was 81. His wife, Brigitte Hort, said the cause was complications of diabetes, for which he had been treated for 30 years.
Ranked among the top players in the world during the 1960s, '70s and '80s, Mr. Hort was a formidable opponent.
He played eight world champions over his career. Though he never won the title, he beat Mr. Spassky once during their quarterfinal match in Iceland and won games against Vasily Smyslov and Anatoly Karpov.
One of the matches that Mr. Hort was most proud of took place in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1970. It pitted the best players in the Soviet Union against the best players in the rest of the world. Mr. Hort, playing in the fourth position for the Soviets' opponents (partly at the insistence of Mr. Fischer), beat Lev Polugaevsky, among the strongest players in the world at the time.
Mr. Hort was awarded the title of grandmaster by the International Chess Federation in 1965, a time when there were fewer than 100 grandmasters in the world.
He was a popular player among his peers, with a sharp wit and a penchant for telling amusing anecdotes; he often called himself a 'chess entertainer.'
Mr. Holt knew all the top players well, but some stood out to him. One was Mr. Fischer. In an article on ChessBase, the website of a chess products company for which he often worked, Mr. Hort recalled staying with Mr. Fischer in 1967 in the villa of a wealthy chess sponsor in the eastern Croatian city of Vinkovci. Mr. Fischer was a rock star in the chess world, so he had been given extra amenities, including several rooms and the private use of the swimming pool.
One day, Mr. Hort had agreed to drive Mr. Fischer around Vinkovci and arrived to pick him up, only to find him playing chess with the host's son, a boy of 10 or 11.
The boy was just a beginner, but the famously mercurial and competitive Mr. Fischer would not give his opponent a chance, crushing him over and over until the boy was on the verge of tears. Mr. Fischer finally looked up and said: 'What do you think, Vlasty? Shall I give him a draw?'
Before Mr. Hort could answer, Mr. Fischer went back to the game, deciding to show no mercy.
Vlastimil Hort was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Kladno, a Bohemian region that was then under Nazi Germany's control and is now part of the Czech Republic. His father, Antonin, worked as a locksmith at the Poldi steel works and played oboe in a musical theater orchestra. His mother, Vlasta Hortova, was a conductor with the Czechoslovak state railway.
When he was 5, Mr. Hort said, he was hospitalized with a high fever and quarantined with an infection for about two months. During his stay, a doctor taught him how to play chess, and he was immediately hooked. Soon after he left the hospital, his mother began taking him to chess clubs.
Though he had no formal chess teacher, Mr. Hort rose rapidly through the ranks. By 16, he was playing on the Czechoslovakian team in the biennial Chess Olympiad. He would represent Czechoslovakia in 11 Chess Olympiads.
He won the national championship five times, including three in a row from 1970 to 1972.
He eventually defected to Germany, in 1985, while playing in a tournament in Tunisia. Speaking on 'The Perpetual Chess Podcast,' he said he had gone to the airport to board a flight for Frankfurt and put $200 into his passport to get by customs. The customs agent took the money and told him to quickly board the plane.
Mr. Hort was granted political asylum in Frankfurt and began playing for Germany, winning the national championship in 1987, 1989 and 1991. He represented Germany in the Chess Olympiad in 1988, 1990 and 1992.
He was fond of giving simultaneous exhibitions, matches in which one plays multiple opponents at the same time. After his loss to Mr. Spassky, Mr. Hort set a world record by playing 550 players, in Iceland. Shortly after he defected to Germany, he set a new world record playing 636 players in an exhibition in Cologne that lasted more than 20 hours.
It was during an exhibition in 1987 in Cologne that he met Brigitte Kreuter. They were married in 1995. In addition to her, he is survived by a son, Daniel, from a previous marriage, in Czechoslovakia; a grandson; and a stepdaughter, Kerstin Müller.
As his playing career wound down, Mr. Hort joined Helmut Pfleger, another grandmaster, in moderating a German television show called 'Chess of the Grandmasters.' The show was popular, in part because of Mr. Hort's wit, and lasted 22 years.
In 2014, he and another Czech grandmaster, Vlastimil Jansa, published 'The Best Move,' a popular instructional chess book.
Mr. Hort won dozens of international tournaments, but one of the most memorable was among his earliest: the 1967-1968 Hastings International Chess Congress in England. He had taken a train and then a boat to get to London, but he arrived with almost no money in his pockets because his chess federation had not given him any.
Having missed the train to Hastings, he wandered around London. With no other place to go, he tried to sleep under a tree in Hyde Park. A policeman found him and took him back to the police station, where Mr. Hort slept in a cell. In the morning, he was given tea and sent on his way.
He played the tournament and ended up tying for first.