Vlastimil Hort

Vlastimil Hort
Hort at the Thessaloniki Olympiad in 1988
Country	Czechoslovakia (until 1986) West Germany (1986–1990)[1] Germany (since 1990)
Born	(1944-01-12) 12 January 1944 (age 80) Kladno, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now Czech Republic)
Title	Grandmaster (1965)
Peak rating	2620 (January 1977)
Peak ranking	No. 6 (January 1977)

Vlastimil Hort (born 12 January 1944) is a Czechoslovak and later 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. He achieved the Grandmaster title in 1965. He won a number of major international tournaments (Hastings 1967–68, Skopje 1969, etc.) and national championships (1970, 1971, 1972, 1975, and 1977). He gained recognition as one of the strongest non-Soviet players in the world, which 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 an undefeated +1 score against the Soviet Grandmaster Lev Polugaevsky—in some respects his greatest result. He defected to the West in 1985,^[2] moving to West Germany and winning the national championship of his new homeland in 1987, 1989, and 1991.