Matthias was already well known as a promising young Swiss talent before he started playing correspondence chess in 1979 at the age of 23. Coming up through the youth section of the Riehen Chess Club (near Basel), he took part in the World Youth Chess Championship in Yugoslavia in 1975 and attracted attention in 1977 by winning the Coup Suisse, a kind of national cup championship. This was followed by appearances in the national team, with the highlights being the 1984 Chess Olympiad in Thessaloniki, the 1985 World Team Championship in Lucerne and the 1986 Chess Olympiad in Dubai. The award of the FIDE Master title in 1987 was therefore more or less overdue.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he won the Swiss team championship six times with the Allschwil Chess Club, and in 2023, at the age of 67, he fulfilled a long-cherished childhood dream in this discipline: winning the championship with SG Riehen, where it all began.
At first, correspondence chess was just a supplement to over-the-board chess for Matthias, but over time it took on a significance of its own. ‘There were times when I enjoyed playing both equally,’ he said in an interview with the Swiss Chess Magazine. But that was before computers became too powerful. For example, in 1992, when he won the grandmaster title in correspondence chess at the Silli Memorial in Italy and achieved a victory with black against the then world champion Fritz Baumbach.

At that time, his playing style in correspondence chess was not very different from that in over-the-board chess, but those days are long gone. ‘Romantic correspondence chess games are no longer possible,’ he says, referring to the computing powerhouses. However, his statement that his playing style has become ‘calmer and more cautious’ also has to do with the development of chess theory and the fact that he is getting older.

Matthias is one of the few lucky chess players who met his future wife at a chess tournament. It was at the turn of 1974/75, when sparks flew between him and Annette at the International German Youth Championship in Südlohn, near the Dutch border. They have been together ever since and started a family a few years later when their son Florian was born in 1988. As he recounts, Annette also unexpectedly played a role in one of his correspondence tournaments. On her way to the shops, he gave her a correspondence chess card to post in the letterbox and five minutes later realised that he had noted down a losing move. ‘How relieved I was when my wife returned and found the card on the floor of the shopping trolley.

For decades, until retirement age, he worked as a commercial clerk at SUVA, an insurance company in Basel that insures people against occupational and leisure accidents. In addition to chess, his hobbies include football (which he used to play actively), tennis, table tennis and hiking in the mountains.

When asked about his ‘secret recipe’ for maintaining his level of performance in chess, he gives an interesting answer: ‘Retaining the sometimes childlike joy of playing chess.'