Chess – Mourning for Robert Hübner

The German chess sport mourns the loss of the former world-class chess player Robert Hübner. The grandmaster from Cologne died of stomach cancer on Sunday at the age of 76. Hübner was the best German chess player after the Second World War.

For almost two decades in the 1970s and 1980s he was among the top international players. In 1981 he even moved up to third place in the world rankings and narrowly missed qualifying for a World Cup match against then world champion Anatoly Karpov. In the candidate final against Viktor Kortschnoj he was initially ahead, but then fell behind after a simple mistake and abandoned the game prematurely.

Later, Hübner distanced himself from organized chess. Hübner saw chess not only as a sporting contest, but also as a deep intellectual pursuit. Away from the board, he devoted himself to many aesthetic questions; Hübner had a doctorate in classical philology and, among other things, he retranslated Homer’s Iliad.