Chris de Ronde

Chris (Christiaan) de Ronde (1912 in Schiedam – 1996 in Buenos Aires) was a Dutch–Argentinian chess master.

He was a champion of Rotterdam. He had studied mathematics in Leyden and Paris.

De Ronde played for the Netherlands in the 8th Chess Olympiad at Buenos Aires 1939, scoring 8½ in his 14 games. After the tournament, during which World War II broke out in Europe (September 1939), De Ronde, along with many other participants of the Olympiad (Miguel Najdorf, Gideon Ståhlberg, et al.) decided to stay permanently in Argentina.

He played in Buenos Aires in 1940, and tied for 12-13th at Buenos Aires (Circulo) 1945 (Miguel Najdorf won).

1939 Chess Olympiad and stay in Buenos Aires

In 1939 de Ronde qualified for the Dutch Candidates Tournament, finishing with 3½/9 (shared 7th–8th; Salo Landau won). As several leading Dutch players declined to travel to Argentina, he was selected at short notice for the national team at the 8th Chess Olympiad in Buenos Aires.

At the Olympiad, played in the same venue as Alexander Alekhine, José Raúl Capablanca, Paul Keres and Savielly Tartakower, de Ronde scored 8½ points from 14 games, the second-best Dutch result, as the Netherlands finished eighth among 27 teams. In the early post-war years, he frequented the Confitería Rex on Avenida Corrientes, a key gathering place for European chess émigrés and local intellectuals such as Witold Gombrowicz.

Databases record at least one game played in Buenos Aires in 1940 and participation in a strong Buenos Aires tournament in 1945 featuring Ståhlberg, Czerniak and Najdorf, where de Ronde scored 1/12.

He resided for decades in the San Telmo neighborhood alongside his partner, Haydee, and their son, Christián (born c. 1976).

In 2019 Argentine author Gustavo Bernstein published De Ronde. Retrato de un apátrida (Ítaca Ediciones, Buenos Aires, ISBN 978-987-45493-8-9), a documentary-literary reconstruction of de Ronde’s life that combines archival material, narrative reconstruction and political context.

Reviews note that the work is structured in 64 chapters and incorporates chronicle, interview fragments and historical commentary to situate de Ronde’s trajectory within broader twentieth-century Argentine political history, including Peronism and the military dictatorship, as well as themes of exile and ideological conflict.