Peter Leko

Peter Leko was born on September 8, 1979 in Subotica, Serbia-Montenegro. In 1994, at the age of 14, he became a grandmaster (a world record at the time). He is considered to be one of the most important opening theorists in the professional circuit.

Under the terms of the so-called "Prague Agreement" masterminded by Yasser Seirawan and intended to united the two World Chess Championships, Leko's 2002 win at Dortmund qualified him to play a match against Vladimir Kramnik. The winner of this match would play the winner of a match between Garry Kasparov and the FIDE World Chess Champion (first Ruslan Ponomariov, then Rustam Kasimdzhanov) to decide the undisputed World Champion. The match was held, after several delays, from September 25 to October 18, 2004 in Brissago, Switzerland. It ended in a 7-7 tie which meant that Kramnik remained the reigning "classical" World Champion.

As part of the Mainz Chess Classic in 2001, Leko narrowly defeated Grandmaster Michael Adams in an eight game Fischer Random Chess Match. As a result, many hailed him as the first Fischer Random Chess World Champion. This claim is not universally accepted, since there were no open qualifying matches. However, many do accept the claim since this was also true of the first orthodox world chess champion titleholders, and bother players were in the top five in the January 2001 world ranking for orthodox chess.

Leko played for the FIDE World Chess Championship title in San Luis, Argentina in October 2005. He finished in 5th place with 6.5 points. Other notable players such as Viswanathan Anand and Veselin Topalov also competed. On the April 2006 FIDE list, he has an ELO rating of 2738, making him 5th in the world and 1st in Hungary.

Download 602 chess games by Peter Leko

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