Veselin Topalov (born 15 March 1975), is a Bulgarian chess grandmaster. He was the challenger facing world champion Viswanathan Anand in the World Chess Championship 2010, losing the match 6½-5½. Topalov was the FIDE World Chess Champion in 2005. He lost his title against Vladimir Kramnik in 2006. He was ranked #1 in the world from April 2006 to January 2007, and had the second highest Elo rating of all time (2813). He has been ranked number one a total of 27 months in his career, fourth all-time since the inception of the FIDE ranking lists in 1971 behind only Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, and Bobby Fischer. Wikipedia.