The Dutch IM Frans Kuijpers, who died on Saturday, May 25 at the age of 83, was four years older than I, but I always considered us to be from the same generation. We played many games against each other, and we were often part of the same Dutch team.
I first met Frans in 1960 at the Dutch Junior Championship in Diever and our last game was in a small rapid tournament of four veteran players (Old Heroes, we were called then) in the Dutch city Haarlem in 2017.
Diever, where we first met, is a village in the eastern Netherlands which was known for the tradition (still continuing these days) of having a Shakespeare play performed by the villagers every summer. For many years the village doctor was the director of the play.
When I came there in 1960, I stayed at the doctor’s house, which, as I realize now, was quite an honor. I was 15 years old and came from humble origins, so the doctor and his family taught me how to eat with knife and fork.
At the beginning of the tournament, I overheard Frans saying to a rival, whom he knew from earlier tournaments, that there was a dangerous newcomer from Amsterdam who had eliminated the mighty Coen Zuidema there. That newcomer was me.
Coen had finished second in the junior championship the year before, and in the following years he would become Dutch junior champion twice. In 1960 Frans was the favorite. He had already won the championship twice and had played in a junior world championship.
In Diever he became Dutch junior champion for the third time, while I had to make do with a line from the tournament report in the magazine of the Dutch Chess Federation: “The play of the young Hans Ree certainly holds promise.”
In 1963, Frans became Dutch adult champion. He finished 1½ points ahead of number two, grandmaster Hein Donner, and at 22 he was then the youngest champion in our history.
Games were played in the Hague office of the main sponsor, the oil company Caltex, and at the beginning of the tournament, the twelve participants received a gift from the chess association of The Hague – a box of cigarettes each.
These were different times, and while we’re at it, I might mention that the chess player Hein Piet van der Spek, formerly from The Hague, wrote on the website of the Club Paul Keres from Utrecht, that Frans, when he was already Dutch junior champion, was refused membership of the venerable Hague club Discendo Discimus (“dog Latin” meaning “by learning we learn”) because the ballot committee considered him too impertinent.
Van der Spek also wrote, but this has nothing to do with Frans, that in 1970 he received a notation sheet from the Rotterdam Chess Federation with the pre-printed text “played at ... by the Gentlemen ...” On the dotted lines, ladies were also allowed to put their names.
Though not entirely impervious to the temptation of life as a professional chess player, Frans finished his studies in Delft, became an engineer, got his PhD and was invited to an interesting job at Philips’ Physics Laboratory in Eindhoven.
The NatLab, as it was generally known, was an internationally renowned scientific institute. Einstein had visited it, and at the time Frans came there, under the leadership of the renowned physicist Hendrik Casimir, author of the fine book Haphazard Reality, it was a place with room for both directly applicable research and fundamental scientific research. Later, when the principle of quick returns reigned supreme, it was stripped down to a knowledge center for household appliances and nowadays it no longer exists.
In a 1975 interview with the Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant, a newspaper from the Dutch province Zeeland, Frans talked about his career choice. His wife Juul Glerum came from Vlissingen and Frans was there for a program of simuls, along with Kavalek, Ljubojevic, Donner and Hartoch.
In the interview, Frans said that shortly after the 1963 championship, he had received a call from Max Euwe asking if he wanted to play in the Alekhine Memorial tournament in Moscow. A tournament with Smyslov, Tal and Keres was an offer that could not be refused.
It was three days before the tournament started. He had to borrow money from Euwe to pay for his ticket to Moscow. Given his great reliability, there is no doubt in my mind that he paid it back to the last penny.
In Moscow, Frans scored 5 out of 13 and experienced the professionalism of the Russians, which the Netherlands could not remotely match. He realized that he couldn’t compete with that. Of course, there was more to explain his choice of profession. To the Zeeland newspaper, Frans said with a chuckle: “In poverty and austerity, the chess grandmaster gets his greatest inspiration.”
As an amateur chess player, he nevertheless threw himself into chess life as much as he could. He played in Dutch tournaments such as the Hoogovens and IBM tournaments, and he played four times on the Dutch team at Olympiads. At the 1974 Olympiad in Nice, he had the fine score of 11 out of 13.
He loved those Olympiads, also as a meeting point with old friends, and later, when he no longer belonged to the Dutch elite, he became a board member of the Dutch Chess Federation and four times a pleasant and efficient team leader of the Dutch Olympiad team.
Of course, he also kept playing real chess, until 2020 in the first team of the Eindhoven Chess Association of which he was an honorary member, not only for his chess achievements, but also for other good deeds for the club.
From my very young years I remember a little article from a newspaper or magazine predicting a bright future for him, because he was “cut from the right cloth.” He certainly was, not only as a strong player, but also as a pleasant human being.
Alexander Kotov (1913-1981), Frans’s opponent in the game in the viewer, may be best known nowadays for his book Think like a Grandmaster. But there was much more. Kotov was educated as an engineer and received the Order of Lenin for a weapons system that he had invented during WW II. As a player, he won the Interzonal in Salsjöbaden in 1952 with the fantastic score of 16½ out of 20, three points ahead of numbers two and three, Petrosian and Taimanov.
He has also been called a KGB agent and this may well have been true. In 1976, Victor Korchnoi defected, first to the Netherlands and later to Germany and Switzerland. I would be Victor’s second during his candidates match against Petrosian in 1977 in Italy.
In 1976 I took part in a tournament in Sochi, on the Black Sea. In Amsterdam, Victor had given me, for a friend, a packet of medicines that apparently were unobtainable in Russia. When in the hotel lounge in Sochi I handed it over to a person who identified himself as a friend of Victor. This was obviously noticed by several people from the chess group.
Near the end of the tournament, Kotov, who had been the arbiter, told me that unfortunately my plane from Moscow to Amsterdam was overbooked, my reservation, which I had made at the KLM office in Amsterdam, had become invalid, and I should stay an additional week in Moscow. I became very angry and said that I would file a complaint with Max Euwe, who was president of FIDE at that time.
“Quiet, quiet, don’t get nervous,” said Kotov. A man who had fought the German army at the front was probably not unduly disturbed by a fuming Dutch master. Nevertheless, the next day I was told that my flight reservation to Amsterdam was valid after all.
I had to stay in Moscow for a day anyway and Kotov proposed that his wife would join me for a tour of the places to see in Moscow. Of course I accepted.
Nice lady, nice tour. She was lively, friendly and intelligent. We eventually got around to Korchnoi. She said that he was a difficult man, gifted but difficult. I said some generalities. Then, when we were talking about his defection, there came the loaded question: did I think that his wife Bella had been aware of his defection previously, before it had happened? I answered that as far as I knew Bella had not known a thing about it, though I knew that the opposite was true.
The next day there was my home flight, the flight that supposedly had been “overbooked.” As always in these years, the plane from Moscow to Amsterdam was almost empty.
Click here to view Kuijpers-Kotov, IBM Tournament, Amsterdam 1968