Vlastimil Hort

Vlastimil Hort
Hort at the Thessaloniki Olympiad in 1988
Full name	Vlastimil Hort
Country	Germany
Born	(1944-01-12) 12 January 1944 (age 73) Kladno, Czechoslovakia
Title	Grandmaster
FIDE rating	2423 (April 2017)
Peak rating	2620 (January 1977)

Vlastimil Hort (born 12 January 1944) is a Czechoslovak-born German chess Grandmaster. During the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the world's strongest players and reached the 1977–78 Candidates Tournament for the World Chess Championship, but never qualified for a competition for the actual title.

Hort was born in Kladno, Czechoslovakia and was a citizen of Czechoslovakia for the first part of his chess career, winning national championships in 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975, and 1977. He achieved the Grandmaster title in 1965 as a Czechoslovak citizen. While playing for Czechoslovakia he won a number of major tournaments (Hastings 1967–68, Skopje 1969, etc.), gaining recognition as one of the strongest non-Soviet players in the world. This led to him representing the "World" team in the great "USSR vs. Rest of the World" match of 1970, where he occupied fourth board and had a +1 score against the Soviet Grandmaster Lev Polugaevsky—in some regards his greatest result. He defected to the West after the 1985 Tunis Interzonal, moving to West Germany and winning the national championship of his new homeland in 1987, 1989, and 1991.

Hort participated in a number of Zonal and Interzonal qualifying tournaments to select a challenger for the world title, generally with good results but without reaching the final stages of the Candidates process. He reached the stage of the Candidates matches of 1977–78 but was eliminated in the first round, in a close match versus the former world champion Boris Spassky.

Hort's long-standing reputation as one of the great sportsmen of chess was enhanced by an event during this match. During the latter stages of the competition, Spassky fell ill and was unable to play. During Candidates matches, each player was allotted a fixed number of rest days to accommodate such situations, but Spassky exhausted his entire allocation of time-outs yet was still unable to compete. At this point Hort could have claimed the match won by forfeit; however, he offered Spassky one of his own time-outs so that the ex-champion could complete his recovery. Spassky did so and went on to win the match by the narrowest possible margin, eliminating Hort from that Candidates cycle.