Robert Huebner (1948-2025)

GM Robert Huebner, the best German chess player since Emanuel Lasker, a four-time world championship candidate, Olympic board one gold medalist, former world number-three, master analyst, writer, polyglot, and papyrologist, has died at the age of 76 after a long illness. 

"Those who say they understand chess, understand nothing."

If you know a thing or two about Huebner, it won't come as a surprise that this quote is from him.

As one of the smartest intellectuals among all the chess grandmasters that ever lived, Huebner knew better than anyone about the endless depths of our beloved game. He was famous for his meticulous and profound analysis, showcased for example in his Twenty-five Annotated Games published in 1996, a book that stretched a stunning 400 pages.

His motto as it came to working on chess—in mostly a pre-engine era—seemed to be that chess, in all its richness, cannot be fully grasped but you can, and should, try as hard as you can.

Huebner was born on November 6, 1948, in Porz, a borough of Cologne, in what would officially become West Germany half a year later. He learned to play chess at the age of five from his father, an educator who taught German, Latin, and Greek.

In 1957, Huebner joined the railway chess club Turm Koln and soon started representing it in team competitions. In 1963, he became German youth champion in Bad Schwalbach, winning with a four-point lead. The following year, he tied for first place with GM Hans Ree in the Niemeyer tournament for European players under 20 in Groningen.

Then, at the World Junior Championship in Barcelona in 1965, Huebner tied for fifth to seventh places. Two years later, in the same event but then in Jerusalem, he finished fourth behind IM Julio Kaplan and GMs Raymond Keene and Jan Timman.

His international breakthrough came at the Interzonal Tournament in Palma de Mallorca in 1970, the tournament that was famously won by future world champion GM Bobby Fischer. Huebner tied for second place, qualified for the Candidates Matches, and achieved a grandmaster norm. He became Germany's youngest grandmaster in 1971. In Palma, he held Fischer to a draw:

He faced former world champion GM Tigran Petrosian in the quarterfinals of the Candidates Matches in Seville, Spain. After six draws, he blundered a piece in a drawn position in the seventh game and then abandoned the match, disturbed by the noise in the tournament hall.

He did beat Petrosian at the Chess Olympiad in Skopje in 1972, where Huebner won the gold medal for Germany's board one with an undefeated score that year: +12 =6 -0. Eventually he would represent Germany 11 times between 1968 and 2000 and score 80.5 points over 122 games.

Huebner qualified for the Candidates Matches again at the Interzonal Tournament in Rio de Janeiro in 1979, where he tied for first place with Petrosian and GM Lajos Portisch. This was his most successful cycle. He first beat GM Andras Adorjan and then Portisch to reach not only the Candidates final, but also the third place in the world rankings, behind GM Anatoly Karpov and his opponent in the final, GM Viktor Korchnoi. 

This 16-game match, held in Meran, Italy, in 1980, was also abandoned by Huebner, after 10 games. He had been leading the match by one point after six but dramatically lost the seventh by blundering a knight fork. He lost the eighth game as well, and the last two (adjourned) games remained unfinished but were awarded to Korchnoi.

Here's what happened in game seven, a key moment in Huebner's career:

Huebner was also involved in what is arguably the strangest finish to a Candidates Match in chess history. As a finalist of the previous cycle, he qualified for the third time and was paired with former world champion GM Vasily Smyslov in the quarterfinals, held in Velden, Austria, in 1983. After 10 games, the score was 5-5 and a playoff saw four draws.

Eventually, this match was decided by fate at the roulette table in a local casino. Smyslov was the lucky one whereas Huebner was eliminated. A further twist is that the ball first ended on zero before it hit a red number, the color Smyslov had chosen.

Boris Spassky, Garry Kasparov and Robert Hübner. Hamburg, 1985.#chess #ajedrez #schach #scacchi #echecs #xadrez pic.twitter.com/riPkZ3InXT

— JustChessMiniatures (@JustChessMini) November 6, 2023

Huebner qualified once more to the Candidates but lost his first-round match in 1991 to Timman. The Dutch grandmaster provided a brief statement to Chess.com about the tragic news: "Really sad news. Robert and I were good friends for many years."

RIP Robert Hübner, my good old friend.

— Jan Timman (@GMJanTimman) January 5, 2025

Huebner was at his strongest between the mid-'70s and the mid-'80s. Apart from Rio de Janeiro 1979, he won several top tournaments in that decade, such as Houston 1974, Munich 1979 (shared with GMs Ulf Andersson and Boris Spassky), Chicago 1982, Biel 1984 (equal with GM Vlastimil Hort), Linares 1985 (shared with Ljubomir Ljubojevic), and Tilburg 1985 (shared with GM Anthony Miles and Korchnoi).

Huebner scored a famous, quick win against Korchnoi at the 1987 Interpolis tournament in Tilburg:

He had a bad score against GM Garry Kasparov (and that was nothing to be ashamed of), but in the very last classical game they played, at Dortmund 1992, Huebner managed to beat the reigning world champion from an incredibly complicated opening and early middlegame:

As said, Huebner was known for his deep analytical skills and his remarkable contributions to chess literature. Apart from Twenty-five Annotated Games, he also wrote Fünfundfünfzig feiste Fehler ("55 Fat Blunders") in 1990 featuring only losses by him. Who else would write such a book?

There was also Materialien zu Fischers Partien ("Material Related to Fischer's Games") from 2004, where he deeply annotated all of Fischer's encounters from My 60 Memorable Games, and Der Weltmeisterschaftskampf Lasker-Steinitz 1894 ("The World Championship Match Lasker-Steinitz 1894") in 2008.

Huebner also had a keen interest in Chinese chess (xiangqi) and played it competitively. In addition to his chess career, he pursued academic work in papyrology, obtaining his doctorate from the University of Cologne in 1976. He specialized in the study of ancient manuscripts.

He was a linguistic genius, as attested by the following anecdote that Hartmut Metz wrote in an article on the occasion of Huebner's 75th birthday:

Huebner is said to speak 22 languages. His genius in this regard is underlined by an anecdote: he once played a game against GM Heikki Westerinen. After the duel, Huebner was unable to communicate with the Finnish grandmaster because, according to the legend, Westerinen only spoke Finnish. So Huebner went home and learned Finnish so that he could talk to Westerinen after the next game!

It should be noted that Huebner self-published a German edition of satires by the Finnish author Vaino Nuorteva in 1993, which makes the above story more likely to be true.

From the same interview:
Q: You have always made very deep analyses of your games. Weren't you too merciless on yourself?
A: I don't think it was a matter of mercy or lack of mercy. I did what I could, & by doing so I have seen that I do not understand too much about chess.

— Douglas Griffin (@dgriffinchess) January 5, 2025

Huebner was an idiosyncratic person. For instance, he held the opinion that every player had a right to his game, which was his own intellectual creation, and that a game could therefore not be published without the player's consent. Like others who tried to uphold the claim of copyright over chess games, Huebner was not successful in the court of law.

When doping controls were introduced in international chess after the 2000 Chess Olympiad, Huebner announced his withdrawal from the German national team. He saw the controls as a "measure of bureaucratic power" that represented a "degradation, incapacitation and disenfranchisement of the individual."

One of the last tournaments Huebner played in was a four-player rapid tournament in Leiden in early March 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the Netherlands. He was the oldest participant alongside Karpov, Timman, and the tournament winner GM Predrag Nikolic. After the tournament was over, "old masters" Nikolic, Karpov, and Timman gave a public post-mortem on stage. Typically, Huebner was watching from the audience.

Wijk aan Zee, 7th round, 19th January 1971. Miguel Najdorf v. Robert Hübner - a key game in the development of what would become known as the Hübner Variation in the Nimzo-Indian Defence.
(📷: R. Croes / ANEFO, via https://t.co/AtUKwRgvRp.) #chess pic.twitter.com/4KSC5YUmR0

— Douglas Griffin (@dgriffinchess) January 5, 2025

The Huebner variation goes 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.e3 c5 5.Bd3 Nc6 6.Nf3 Bxc3+.

In 1993, Huebner served as a second to GM Nigel Short in his PCA World Championship match in London against Kasparov. For this obituary, Short commented:

He worked as my main second against Kasparov and organized many things. I’m very grateful for that. He was very organized and hard-working. He was brought in relatively late, specifically for the match. I had great respect for him as a player and as an analyst. He wasn’t a theoretician, but he was interested in getting to the bottom of things. 

Others will speak about his career and his achievement, but I want to share something more personal. We spent hours and hours talking about all sorts of things, and I have certain very fond memories. For instance, one afternoon, Robert was reading The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde out loud. He was performing it, in its entirety. This is a side to Robert that people never saw. They would see a very serious person, aloof, but there was absolutely another side. He was very funny. He had a biting sense of humor and was very self-deprecating.

We discussed all sorts of things. It could be music, or linguistics, for example Inuit grammar. Not that I knew anything about Inuit grammar, but he did. Oh, and he had a huge collection of Asterix. There was this playful side to him. Talking about pop music was not so easy. For instance, he had never heard of Elvis Presley. He was a very special person! And he had a fantastic collection of chess books.

When he analyzed a game of his for Chess Informant, it would lead to a work of several pages full of moves and symbols. When I said to him, “Robert, nobody reads this,” he replied: “I know nobody reads this. I do it for myself.“ He was doing it for his own understanding, for his intellectual curiosity.

My friend and co-author CM Arne Moll provided a nice anecdote, which I am sharing here:

I spoke to Huebner once. It was at the Ter Apel tournament in 1997 where all the players stayed in the same hotel. I was analyzing with a player of my level and a patzer. The patzer showed his lost game. Suddenly Huebner came to sit with him and started giving very constructive commentary. The loser kept saying: "I'm already totally won here," to which Huebner said: "Yes, that's true, but if I do THAT, it's still difficult. See for yourself. You can always make it difficult for your opponent, no matter how lost you are.

I found that extremely instructive at the time and have always remembered it. I have saved many points in my career by thinking about Huebner, and still every day in blitz and bullet my motto is: "You can always make it difficult for your opponent, no matter how lost you are."

We can remember Huebner when we end up in bad positions—so he continues to inspire us to fight harder. Or simply as the world-class player that he certainly was at the peak of his career. We've lost one of those very special characters of the chess world. He died on Sunday, January 5, 2025, of stomach cancer in a hospital in Cologne-Dellbruck.