Vlastimil Hort (1944-2025)

The Czech-German grandmaster Vlastimil Hort, a former world number-six, a candidate for the world championship, and a commentator renowned for his wit and humor, died on Monday at the age of 81. The news was confirmed by the Czech Chess Federation.

"I lost my life in chess, actually."

"Chess is beautiful and it gives you always some idea that maybe you are not so old."

"You know, I am a chess entertainer. I want to entertain people."

These quotes, from 1981 and from 2014, sum things up pretty well for Hort, who had a long and successful chess career as a player and later turned into a beloved commentator. The oldest readers will remember him as a world class player between the late 1960s and early 1980s, and particularly his Candidates match with GM Boris Spassky. The next generation will immediately think of the legendary TV program Schach der Großmeister ("Chess of the Grandmasters") on the German channel WDR where Hort provided joyful commentary of grandmaster games alongside GM Helmut Pfleger. 

Vlastimil Hort was born on January 12, 1944, in Kladno, a town near Prague in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic. He learned the rules of chess, by coincidence, at the age of five while staying in a hospital. When asked about this later in life, Hort didn't remember the illness, but he did remember the name of the doctor who taught him about the knight moving in an L shape: Doctor Novak.

After being released from the hospital, the young Vlastimil went looking for opponents and joined one of the many chess clubs in the region. He had a passion for the game from the start, which never left him for the rest of his life.

Hort was also very much into ice hockey, and when he was 17, he had to make a choice between his two pastimes. He explained why the decision was perhaps not too difficult to make: "When I played I was a goalkeeper and I had to be [at] the stadium at 3.30 in the morning! To just get all this [equipment] on me. I remember still that I wore no mask, you know, so imagine! But then I decided and I stopped these ice hockey activities."

Hort played his first Olympiad at the young age of 16, representing the Czechoslovak national team in 1960 in Leipzig. He scored a very decent 7.5/13 on board four, with GMs Ludek Pachman, Miroslav Filip and IM Jiri Fichtl also in the team.

Hort would eventually play in 14 Olympiads in total, in the years 1960-1974, 1980-1984, and 1988-1992, representing Czechoslovakia and Germany. Already playing on board one in 1972 in Skopje, Hort earned an individual silver medal and was also awarded the best game prize for his win against then reigning World Junior Champion Werner Hug. 

Hort's best team performance at Olympiads was in Lucerne 1982, where Czechoslovakia won the silver medal. Hort was playing on top board, alongside GMs Jan Smejkal, Lubomir Ftacnik, Vlastimil Jansa, Jan Plachetka, and IM Jan Ambroz.

His individual career was highly successful, with six Czechoslovakian national titles, three German Championships, and over 80 international tournament victories. His first came as early as 1965, when he won in Marianske Lazne together with GM Paul Keres. FIDE awarded him the GM title that year.

An anecdote from early in his career says something about the life of Eastern European players at the time. When he was invited for the first time for the 1967-1968 Hastings tournament, Hort was already the top player in his country and a top-20 player in the world and would end up sharing first at the tournament.

To get to Hastings, he took a train and a boat to England, where he arrived without any foreign money. While in London, waiting for the morning train to Hastings, he decided to sleep under a tree.

"I found myself just getting under the tree, you know, and suddenly I was disturbed because there was snow and the policemen discovered me there," he told the story many years later. "It was nice because I could spend the rest of [the night] at the police station. Of course I showed my passport and I had no money, so they even gave me [blankets]. I could spend the night in a room where normally criminals are. They [provided] tea for me. The next day I was lucky because I was not checked even. So, I appreciate the tree!"

He was still studying economics (foreign trade) at that point, but would rather spend his time playing blitz at the U Novaku cafe in Prague. It was there where he met the Czechoslovak master Karel Opocensky, the first "chess professional" in the country. Hort decided to pursue a professional chess career himself in 1968, the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Already then, he was considering leaving the country but didn't because he wanted to stay close to his son Daniel, who was one year old at the time.

In that same year 1968, Hort had an encounter with former World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik, a loyal member of the Communist Party. It was in Monaco and Botvinnik was playing one of the last tournaments of his career—he wanted to win it. GM Bent Larsen, however, was still in contention as well, and the Dane had an adjourned game with Hort.

At some point, Hort's phone rang in his hotel room, and it was Botvinnik on the line, who said he wanted to show some variations in the adjourned position. "I said to him, 'I analyzed well enough, and you just want to help me because you want to win this tournament? It is not the way, you know, I am not used to it; to (getting) such help." Botvinnik got angry and hung up.

Fate had it that the two were playing their mutual game the next day, and Botvinnik didn't shake hands at the start. Hort told what happened next: "He pressed me in the game, but in a completely drawn position, I offered him a draw in Russian, in English. He was sitting there and imagine: I came suddenly to the board and there is nobody, he left already!"

The arbiter told Hort that if he wanted to win the game he could, because Botvinnik had left the playing hall. "I will be your witness, but think of it very carefully." Hort thought very carefully, and signed a draw on the scoresheet.

Two year later, at 26, Hort was the youngest participant at the famous Match of the Century, in 1970 in Belgrade. In this historic match, 10 Soviet players only narrowly beat 10 players from the Rest of the World 20.5-19.5. While both GMs Samuel Reshevsky and Miguel Najdorf tried to claim it, it was GM Bobby Fischer (who had conceded board one to Larsen!) who insisted that Hort played on board four.

The latter didn't disappoint and beat GM Lev Polugaevsky 2.5-1.5. With Hort's passing, the only player still alive active in the event is GM Lajos Portisch (alongside GM Klaus Darga, who was a reserve player but didn't play).

Shortly after, Hort also participated in the strong "Tournament of Peace," held in Rovinj and Zagreb. Finishing second behind Fischer, he was the only one among the 18 participants to remain undefeated. An anecdote from Hort about this tournament:

After the tournament Fischer and I received a special invitation. We were to spend a few days on a ship that would take us to places on the blue Yugoslavian sea we had not yet seen. On board were some attractive hostesses, of course because of Fischer. They swarmed around him like hornets, but he paid them no attention at all. Only when they served him his beloved cold milk or the countless steaks he hastily devoured, did he look up briefly from the chessboard and nod his head. He was almost always focused on his pocket chess set. If he did not analyze, which was rare, he liked to jump headfirst from the railing into the sea. At that time he was still in shape and handsome! When I evoke memories of him at that time I always think of Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan.

After cooling down in the sea he dried off as quickly as possible to immediately return to the chess set or dedicate himself to some chess journal. There was not much talking! For me it was an experience to be that close to my idol so privately from close up. I was very lucky!

Hort would score some major tournament victories in the 1970s and early 1980s, including Gothenburg 1971 (with GM Ulf Andersson, ahead of Spassky, who finished sole third), Havana 1971 (with GM Efim Geller), Reykjavik 1972 (with Florin Gheorghiu and Fridrik Olafsson, Hastings 1974/75 (sole first), Hastings 1975/76 (shared with GMs David Bronstein and Wolfgang Uhlmann), Banja Luka (1976), Polanica-Zdroj (1977), Amsterdam 1979 (with Gyula Sax), Biel 1981 (with GM Eric Lobron), Dortmund 1982, Biel 1984 (with GM Robert Hubner) and Dortmund 1985 (with GMs Yury Razuvaev and Stefan Kindermann).

At Wijk aan Zee, Vlastimil Hort finished four times as the runner-up, including in the 1975 edition. He won an excellent game against GM Walter Browne there:

Hort moved to West Germany around 1979 and would formally emigrate  in 1985. "The truth about my emigration is, of course I didn’t like communism at all, but I was waiting for my son," he later explained. Hort's son Daniel was somehow more reluctant than his father to leave the country.

Hort was playing for Prago-Sport at the time, a Czechoslovakian organization that sold ice hockey players to Switzerland and was also behind the Holiday on Ice shows in Czechoslovakia.  Eventually it was chess patron Wilfried Hilgert who paid around 60,000 Deutschmarks to Prago-Sport, after which Hort started playing for SG Porz e.V. in Cologne. With the team he won the German league in 1979, 1982, 1984, 1994, 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000.

Hort formally emigrated after the 1985 Interzonal Tournament in Tunis, smoothening things at the airport with a bribe. "When I was passing the passport control to Lufthansa, flying to Germany, I left $200 in my passport so that they would let me go. The guy…he took it and he said, yes, please follow the line. And you go!"

It was at the aforementioned Lucerne Olympiad in 1982 where Hort had already shown himself to be anti-communist. When the news arrived during the event that Leonid Brezhnev had died, the Swiss organizers decided to play the Soviet anthem to commemorate the Soviet leader. Hort decided to escape to the restrooms, where he discovered GM Lubomir Kavalek. "We were just two Czechs with the same idea!"

At the peak of his career, Hort was a candidate for the world championship in the 1977-1978 cycle. He had qualified for the candidates matches with a second place at the Manila Interzonal in 1976, behind the Brazilian GM Henrique Mecking. 

Hort's candidates match with Spassky, played in Reykjavik five years after the Match of the Century, is remembered for what has been called "the greatest act of sportsmanship in the history of chess."

At a 6-6 score, Spassky was admitted to a hospital where his appendix was removed. The former world champion requested a postponement for the next four games, but was only allowed to postpone three. Hort then decided to request a postponement himself for that fourth game. (Some reports claimed that, as the score remained equal, Hort later needed a time-out longer than was allowed and Spassky returned the favor by requesting another time-out as well!)

In the 15th and penultimate game, with the match still tied, Hort reached a winning position with the black pieces and should have had enough time on the clock to convert, but he flagged instead. Somehow, he got into some form of paralysis, not physically able to execute his moves, as he would later say. It was a key moment in Hort's career.

With a draw in the final game, Spassky won the match, while Hort set a world record a few days later in Reykjavik, playing a simultaneous exhibition against 550 opponents that lasted 24 hours and 20 minutes. His score was 477 wins, 63 draws, 10 lost games, and two lost kilos.

Hort was also known as a great entertainer and was a regular guest at the events of the Prague Chess Society and later the Prague Chess Festival. The German public got to know him for his participation in Schach der Großmeister, with his typical Czech accent and his joyful style of talking. "Hort's subtle humor, filled with aphorisms and amusing anecdotes, earned the show a loyal following not just among chess enthusiasts, but beyond," wrote Andre Schulz.

Below you can get a taste as he comments, together with Pfleger, on a game between Hubner and GM Jan Timman. 

Co-written with Jansa, Hort's book The Best Move ("Zahrajte si šachy s velmistry" in Czech, "Вместе с гроссмейстерами" in Russian) is a masterpiece that has remained in high esteem until now. He also wrote many articles for ChessBase, which were later bundled in the book My Chess Stories.

Another legacy in the chess world is the "Hort System" for distributing prizes at tournaments. It was Hort who came up with the idea that each player in the cash prize pool receives 50 percent of the prize money allocated for their place, and the remaining 50 percent of the prize money goes into a pot for the tied players and is distributed equally among them.

Czech GM David Navara, who played two draws against him in rapid games, described Hort as follows: "He has never been an opening expert, but was a clever universal player, was strong in the middlegame and endgame, and was often choosing openings which were uncomfortable for his opponents: dry lines against tacticians, sharp lines against positional players, and so on."

"I was very proud of my middlegame, you know, I wanted always to decide the games not in the opening, but in the middlegame," Hort said himself. "I was no good [as a] theoretician, but I studied the middlegame in Czechoslovakia very much. At my weekend house, I closed myself [off] and I wanted to know where the pieces have to go."

On the occasion of his 65th birthday, Hort received the Honorary Gold Plaque of the President of the Czech Republic. He lived the last years of his life in Eitorf, some 25 kilometers east of Bonn, together with his wife Brigitte.

This author had the privilege of playing Hort in a classical and a rapid game, the latter during a tournament held in a train in 2011. I lost both, of course, one in a King's Indian and one in a Grunfeld. My opponent's calm and friendly explanations of where I went wrong will always stay with me.

In that same year 2011, Hort and his wife Brigitte were among the guests at the final Amber Tournament in Monaco, sponsored by the Dutch billionaire Joop van Oosterom. For a farewell gift to Van Oosterom, Macauley Peterson and yours truly filmed an interview with Brigitte and Vlastimil in which they reflected on the many years of being in "chess paradise," as they described the tournament.

Hort: “When I watch the chess here, I forget everything. I forget my illnesses, I forget the rheuma in my knees, I forget everything. For me this is a beautiful world of the pieces who are dancing, who are rocking on the board sometimes and sometimes they are just dancing a waltz. This chess harmony is really for me what I appreciated very much. I think that the whole world was having its pleasure, its fun. It was fun.”

Hort continued playing serious games until a few years ago, for the Oberhausen chess club and also for instance in Switzerland for the clubs Schachfreunde Reichenstein, Schachklub Luzern, and SK Reti Zurich. He had to give up traveling in recent years as he was struggling with progressing diabetes and rheumatism in his legs. For the chess lover that he was, this was a truly sad development.

"It's a bohemian life," Hort said in 1981. "I am from Czechoslovakia, it was called Bohemia. Well, I don’t mind, I lost my life in chess actually. But I think it’s nice."

"I have a really nice relationship with chess," he said in 2017. "Sometimes I really feel sorry for my colleagues who say, for example, Ivkov, or those old guys, who say 'I have to play chess.' You would never hear that from me. I'm happy that I'm going to play chess on Sunday."

This article includes segments from ChessBase's Hort Stories and from Ben Johnson's Perpetual Chess Podcast episode with Hort from February 2021, which is recommended listening in full:

Correction: an earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Hort was the strongest Czech-born chess player between the eras of GMs Richard Reti and David Navara. However, Reti was not Czech-born.