Learning From Jan Timman
The passing of legendary GM Jan Timman is a great loss for the chess world. Not only was he an elite player, often called "The Best of the West," but he was also a truly unique personality.
When I saw his photos in chess magazines in the 1980s, he looked like a rock star who had somehow wandered into a room full of people playing chess. In the mid-1990s, I finally had the chance to meet him in person while playing in numerous tournaments across Europe. We even played a game against each other at the 1992 Chess Olympiad in Manila.
Unfortunately, we never had the opportunity to talk beyond the postmortem analysis of our game. Nevertheless, I feel a certain invisible connection with Timman, a connection through our games. So while I cannot share any new facts about Jan's life, I would like to revisit some of his games and reflect on what I learned from them.
At the beginning of the 1980s, World Champion Anatoly Karpov was at the zenith of his chess career, and any game he lost was seen as a sensation. Therefore, I vividly remember the strong impression left by the following game:
As an 11-year-old kid who had been playing chess for just three years, I couldn't even understand where Karpov made a mistake. It looked like White had a very promising position out of the opening, and then, out of the blue, he ended up with a lost endgame. In my old article, I explained how I analyzed Karpov's games by trying to learn as much as possible. Therefore, here I felt like it was absolutely essential to solve this mystery. With the serious help of my coach, I finally figured out what happened.
I wish I had seen Jan Timman's annotations at that time, since it would have made it much easier. Here is what he wrote:
This was a major revelation! Thanks to this game, I learned that the move e4-e5, which looks like a signal for a crushing attack, can, in fact, lead to a long-term weakness of the e5-pawn. I was very excited when I was able to use this knowledge in my game against the star of the Soviet junior chess, two-time U16 World Champion, and future super GM Aleksey Dreev:
I saw the following position in a chess magazine as an excellent example of positional chess. White's move made a very strong impression on me. The position looked quite boring and uneventful. Yet, with an unexpected maneuver, Timman prepares an attack against Black's king. Can you figure out his beautiful plan in the following position?
Here is the whole game:
Of course, when I had a similar position against GM Alexander Ivanov, I prevented Timman's brilliant idea:
As you can see, we achieved a very similar position with reversed colors. Naturally, I played 8.Bg5! to pin the f6-knight and didn't trade the central pawns (dxe5), so the d6-square would never be available for Black's f6-knight.
When I started playing chess, Timman was already one of the best players in the world, so naturally I learned a lot from him. However, I am very proud that there is at least one thing that the Dutch chess legend learned from me. Our game that I mentioned above was quite interesting:
While Timman had a winning position in the middlegame after my mistake, he couldn't miss the obvious fact that Black was suffering in the opening. So, next year in his FIDE World Championship match against Karpov, Timman used a very similar idea himself:
Jan Timman has written many excellent chess books. Two of them, Timman's Titans and Timman's Triumphs, are collections of his games and memorable moments of his life. I strongly recommend these books to all chess aficionados. Not only will you learn a lot of stories from the "golden age of chess," but you will also improve your chess and dramatically increase your collection of positional chess patterns, similar to the ones that we've discussed today.
