Hans-Walter Schmitt
Hans-Walter Schmitt (born March 4, 1952 in Oberzerf ) is a German entrepreneur, manager and chess organizer .
Career
Hans-Walter Schmitt was born in 1952 as the eldest son of a farming family and grew up with a brother and three sisters in Oberzerf. At the age of 14 he began an apprenticeship as an agricultural machinery mechanic. Via the second educational path he did his Abitur at the technical high school in Frankfurt . In 1974 he began studying medicine in Frankfurt and completed a physics course , as well as first and second state exams . He decided against a career as a doctor, instead attended the European Business School and worked at the Control Data Institute a. a. with program and system analysis. Later he rose to top management in sales at Siemens. Hans-Walter Schmitt lives with his wife Cornelia in Bad Soden am Taunus .
Chess organizer
Hans-Walter Schmitt shaped the German chess scene like no other organizer for a long time. His organizational talent ranges from World Cup fights and grandmaster tournaments to supporting chess talents such as Vincent Keymer and Luis Engel to the systematic development of teaching units for the promotion of young talent.
In the Chess Classic competitions he initiated , which were held in Frankfurt am Main and Mainz from 1994 to 2010 , the world's best came to the fore.
The chess association Chess Tigers , which he co-founded in Bad Soden on September 9, 1999 , was headed by Schmitt for many years.
Schmitt is a fan and promoter of the chess variant Chess960 ( Fischer Random Chess ), which goes back to Bobby Fischer , and organized world championships in this discipline for the first time. When he heard about Fischer's imprisonment in Japan in 2004, he founded a "Free Bobby Fischer" initiative, launched a signature campaign among the grandmasters of the Chess Classic Mainz and sent a letter with a request for help to Otto Schily, then Interior Minister .
After the end of the Chess Classics, Schmitt focused more on promoting young talent. Since 2014, the Youth Classics has been an annual tournament of national importance in Bad Soden am Taunus.
On October 3, 2019, at the age of 67, Schmitt completed his official career as a chess organizer, just as he had started a quarter of a century ago in Bad Soden: In two simultaneous sessions on 40 boards each against Vincent Keymer and Viswanathan Anand , with whom he a close friendship connects.
Web links
- Hans-Walter Schmitt at the World Chess Federation FIDE (English)
- Homepage of the Chess Tigers Training Center
- Tournament homepage of the Youth Classic
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gerhard Gorges: "Chess has to get louder": Interview with Hans-Walter Schmitt. In: schach district-mittelbaden.de. March 23, 2007. Retrieved October 29, 2019 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Schmitt, Hans-Walter |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German entrepreneur, manager and chess organizer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 4th 1952 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Oberzerf |