Joop van Oosterom (12 December 1937 – 22 October 2016) was a Dutch

billionaire A billionaire is a person with a net worth of at least one billion (1,000,000,000, i.e., a thousand million) units of a given currency, usually of a major currency such as the United States dollar, euro, or pound sterling. The American busin ...

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...

and

billiards Cue sports are a wide variety of games of skill played with a cue, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered table bounded by elastic bumpers known as . There are three major subdivisions of ...

sponsor, and twice correspondence chess world champion. His fortune, made with the Volmac Software Group, was estimated by Dutch financial magazine

Quote Quote is a hypernym of quotation, as the repetition or copy of a prior statement or thought. Quotation marks are punctuation marks that indicate a quotation. Both ''quotation'' and ''quotation marks'' are sometimes abbreviated as "quote(s)". C ...

at €1.1 billion at the time of his death. From 1992 to 2011 he staged the annual

Melody Amber The Amber chess tournament (officially the ''Amber Rapid and Blindfold Chess Tournament'', previously ''Melody Amber'') was an annual invitation-only event for some of the world's best players, from 1992 to 2011. Since the second edition, the event ...

chess tournament in

Monaco Monaco (; ), officially the Principality of Monaco (french: Principauté de Monaco; Ligurian: ; oc, Principat de Mónegue), is a sovereign city-state and microstate on the French Riviera a few kilometres west of the Italian region of Lig ...

, where world-class Grandmasters played rapid and blindfold games. It is named after his first daughter Melody Amber. His other daughter was the eponym to the Crystal Kelly Cup, an invitational tournament for

three-cushion Three-cushion billiards, also called three-cushion carom, is a form of carom billiards. The object of the game is to the off both while contacting the at least three times before contacting the second object ball. A point is scored for each su ...

carom billiards Carom billiards, sometimes called carambole billiards, is the overarching title of a family of cue sports generally played on cloth-covered, billiard tables. In its simplest form, the object of the game is to score or "counts" by ' one's o ...

, which has been held between 1994 and 2011 mostly in

Monte Carlo Monte Carlo (; ; french: Monte-Carlo , or colloquially ''Monte-Carl'' ; lij, Munte Carlu ; ) is officially an administrative area of the Principality of Monaco, specifically the ward of Monte Carlo/Spélugues, where the Monte Carlo Casino is ...

and

Nice Nice ( , ; Niçard: , classical norm, or , nonstandard, ; it, Nizza ; lij, Nissa; grc, Νίκαια; la, Nicaea) is the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative c ...

. Van Oosterom was a strong

correspondence chess Correspondence chess is chess played by various forms of long-distance correspondence, traditionally through the postal system. Today it is usually played through a correspondence chess server, a public internet chess forum, or email. Less common ...

player, but suffered a severe

brain haemorrhage Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), also known as cerebral bleed, intraparenchymal bleed, and hemorrhagic stroke, or haemorrhagic stroke, is a sudden bleeding into the tissues of the brain, into its ventricles, or into both. It is one kind of bleed ...

in 1993. Nevertheless, he concluded the world correspondence chess championship successfully and became the 18th World Champion in Correspondence Chess in 2005. This achievement, however, has been criticized, as at the time of the championship van Oosterom had hired the strong grandmaster

Jeroen Piket Jeroen Piket (born 27 January 1969) is a Dutch chess grandmaster. He is a four-time Dutch Chess Champion. Chess career Born in 1969, Piket earned his international master title in 1986 and his grandmaster title in 1989. He won the Dutch Chess C ...

as his personal secretary. Earlier, van Oosterom had had two Dutch International Masters on his payroll whose job was to analyse his correspondence games. Chess author

Tim Krabbé Tim Krabbé (born 13 April 1943) is a Dutch journalist, novelist and chess player. Krabbé was born in Amsterdam. His writing has appeared in most major periodicals in the Netherlands. Once a competitive cyclist, he is known to Dutch readers for ...

wrote: " The Turk was operated by

William Schlumberger William Schlumberger (1800 – April 1838) was a European chess master. He is known to have taught Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant to play chess and as the operator of The Turk, a chess-playing machine which was purported to be an automato ...

Mephisto Mephisto or Mephistopheles is one of the chief demons of German literary tradition. Mephisto or Mephistopheles may also refer to: Film and television * ''Méphisto'', a 1931 French film * Mephisto (1981 film), ''Mephisto'' (1981 film), a German- ...

was operated by

Isidore Gunsberg Isidore ( ; also spelled Isador, Isadore and Isidor) is an English and French masculine given name. The name is derived from the Greek name ''Isídōros'' (Ἰσίδωρος) and can literally be translated to "gift of Isis." The name has survived ...

Ajeeb Ajeeb was a chess-playing "automaton", created by Charles Hooper (a cabinet maker), first presented at the Royal Polytechnical Institute in 1868. A particularly intriguing piece of faux mechanical technology (while presented as entirely automat ...

was operated by

Harry Pillsbury Harry Nelson Pillsbury (December 5, 1872 – June 17, 1906) was an American chess player. At the age of 22, he won one of the strongest tournaments of the time (winning the Hastings 1895 chess tournament), but his illness and early death prevent ...

and Joop van Oosterom is operated by Jeroen Piket." Van Oosterom also won the 21st World Championship Final in Correspondence Chess in 2008. In February 2017 it was announced that van Oosterom had died in October 2016. No cause of death was announced and it is not clear why it was kept secret.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Van Oosterom, Joop 1937 births 2016 deaths World Correspondence Chess Champions Correspondence chess grandmasters Dutch chess players People from Hilversum Chess patrons Dutch billionaires 20th-century philanthropists