This month Jan Timman will turn 74. At the end of October, he confirmed in an interview something that chess players who had followed his club Wageningen in the national competition and had missed Timman’s name, had already suspected. Timman remains addicted to chess; he will happily continue to write books and articles and compose endgame studies until his dying breath, but he was retiring from competitive chess, because it had become too tiring for him .
The most concise reaction was a four-line poem I saw on the Dutch schaaksite.nl
Cruijff
Zoetemelk
Timman
Heroes
I don’t know much about the other two sports heroes, but Timman’s hero status is beyond dispute. Many people in the Netherlands reacted by telling that Timman had inspired them to take up chess.
The first time I played against him was in 1964 in the Dutch U-20 championship in Rotterdam which was won by Leo Kerkhoff. I have forgotten the result of the game we played and could not find it on the web, but I’m sure that Jan with his prodigal memory will still know it.
Then in 1968, also in Rotterdam, we played a short match. He was 16, I was 24. It was a training match, training for him. I was Dutch champion and was being paid. The result was 2-2 and I was disappointed. Couldn’t I beat this young boy? But soon the balance of power would shift.
We played dozens of games against each other, and I believe the last time I won one was in 1979. In the 1970s, we were almost neighbors for a few years. I had a more or less presentable apartment on Spiegelgracht in Amsterdam. Even to my standards, Jan’s room seemed almost uninhabitable, with the floor covered with magazines, wine bottles, money from many countries, and old food that had been maturing for months.
Later, Jan once said that only a very orderly mind could live in such apparent chaos. I realized he was right when I visited another of his homes, where a recent relocation had left a huge pile of books and magazines on the floor.
Someone quoted something, but where exactly could this quote be found? Jan jumped into the mountain of books like Scrooge McDuck into his mountain of money and unerringly pulled out the book in question. Speaking of Scrooge McDuck, I was pleased to read recently that Jan, like me, still has a subscription to the Dutch weekly magazine Donald Duck.
I followed him as a reporter for the newspaper NRC-Handelsblad during his candidate matches. The match I remember best was against Nigel Short in 1993 in the Spanish town San Lorenzo de El Escorial. The gridiron on which Saint Lorenzo had died had become the emblem of the village; you saw it everywhere.
In the middle of summer, it is said to be a blazing tourist hell, but in the January winter sun, I found it delightful. Every day, Dutch journalists lit a candle for Jan in the cathedral. Nigel Short did the same, for himself. “I am an atheist, but also an opportunist,” he said.
Upon our return, we noticed that chess fever had broken out in the Netherlands. Members of parliament were accused of playing on two boards at the same time and replied that there was nothing wrong with being a good simultaneous player. Another member of parliament was accused of cowardly exchanging pieces to kill the game.
The twelfth match game was decisive. In turn, Short and Timman had a big advantage and the Dutch patriots who were present went through many emotions. When Short won and the match had become hopeless for Jan, I wrote the unpleasant result 1-0 on the sheet on which I had had been keeping the game score. But then inadvertently I also signed it, as if it were my own game. It was a crass example of identification with Jan.
When in 2001 he turned fifty and read articles about his anniversary in newspapers and magazines, Jan said: “They all give a few of my endgame studies. Or a brilliant game from long ago. That’s nice, but it feels a bit as if they’re writing obituaries and forget that I still have an active chess career.”
For this article, I also hesitated between an endgame study and a brilliant game from the past, but an obituary is far from my mind. Jan is one of the best and most prolific chess writers in the world, and almost every year he publishes a beautiful new book. In November this year he published Timman’s Studies, thereby finishing a trilogy that started with his earlier books Timman’s Titans and Timman’s Triumphs. Timman’s Studies is a big book of 456 pages in which he has collected 160 of his own studies.
He has been composing endgame studies since the 1970s and has become one of the greatest artists in this field. He has always had the fortunate gift of admiration, which is evident from a comment in the foreword to his book The Art of the Endgame.
In that foreword, he wrote, “The studies by Troitzky and Kubbel had a special magic. I felt that their masterpieces were made for eternity.”
As we all know, Siegbert Tarrasch wrote that chess, like love, like music, has the power to make people happy. Jan Timman is the embodiment of that statement.
I have taken the endgame study below (including the comments) from his book 100 Endgame Studies You Must Know, published in 2024. Of the 100 classics he chose for that book, three are by Timman himself. In 1992, during a vacation in France, the esteemed Dutch novelist Tim Krabbé, who is mainly known to the international chess world for his wonderful website Chess Curiosities, showed Timman a theme for which he already had designed a scheme: the double Prokes maneuver. Only many years later Timman managed, with indispensable help of the computer, to convert the scheme into a good study.
He writes: “What is a Prokes maneuver?” the reader may ask. This will soon become clear in the main line.
The study was first printed in Timman’s The Art of the Endgame from 2011. Click here to view the study.