Péter Lékó (born September 8, 1979 in Subotica) is a Hungarian chess player. He became a grandmaster in 1994 at the age of 14 years (a world record at the time). In the April 2005 FIDE list, he has an ELO rating of 2763, making him number four in the world, and Hungary's number one.
In 2001, Lékó narrowly defeated Grandmaster Michael Adams in an eight game Fischer Random Chess (Chess960) match played as part of the Mainz Chess Classic.
As a result, Lékó was hailed by many as the first Fischer Random Chess world champion.
This claim is not universally accepted, since there were no open qualifying matches.
Many do accept the claim, however, since this was also true of the first orthodox world chess champion titleholders, and both players were in the top five in the January 2001 world rankings for orthodox chess.
Lékó won the Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting in 2002, the Linares tournament in 2003 (tied with Vladimir Kramnik) and the Corus tournament in 2005.
Under the terms of the so-called "Prague Agreement ", masterminded by Yasser Seirawan, and intended to unite the two World Chess Championships, Lékó's 2002 win at Dortmund qualified him to play a match against Vladimir Kramnik. It was intended that 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. After several delays, the match was held from September 25-October 18, 2004. It ended in a 7-7 tie, which entitled Kramnik to remain the reigning "classical" world champion.
External link