Peter RAJCSANYI

Candidate for Deputy President Position

As a five-year old kid, he learned to play chess in the family from his grandfather and father. He played the game throughout school competitions but chess was not the only sport he was engaged in and at the age of 11 he switched to basketball. His team became several times the national youth champion and he was invited first into the national youth team and later to the national basketball team. He returned to chess only after her daughter, Zita started to play chess at the age of 6 and  soon became national champion in her age group and won the national youth champion title several times. She was also successful in the national adult chess championships and participated twice in the World Championship zonal tournaments.

In 1991, they successfully brought back Bobby Fischer, the legendary world chess champion into the chess life and participated in the organization of the Fischer-Spassky world championship rematch. Peter Rajcsanyi was also the spokesman and one of the organizers of the Judit Polgar – Boris Spassky match in Budapest  -  the most popular chess event in Hungary in the 1990s. A few years later in 1998, the Hungarian Chess Federation invited him to serve as its delegation in FIDE and the European Chess Union. As one of his early activities in the ECU, he became the chairman of two ad-hoc committees which restructured the ECU statutes and inititated the renegotiation of the financial arrangement between ECU and FIDE, substantially improving the financial status of the ECU. Between 2002 and 2006, he was elected member of the FIDE Executive Board. In 2006, the FIDE Congress in Turin approved his appointment by President  Kirsan Ilyumzhinov as FIDE Public Relations and Marketing Director. His many activities in the last four years contributed to the increased reputation of FIDE among the international sport federations, chess players and chess lovers.

He received an M.S. degree in the Technical University of Budapest and also finished studies in the economic science. He holds an MBA degree from the University of Lincolnshire. Having been engaged in international and foreign policy activities as employee of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry for 15 years and as adviser to the Hungarian political leadership during the late 1980s, he became director of the Hungarian Privatization Agency in 1990 and successfully managed the privatization of many key Hungarian companies, including the largest hotel chains. Then he was director of investment of the second largest Hungarian bank and the managing director of the Project Office of the Hungarian government which was responsible for initiating and implementing large-scale government projects. During the past twelve years, he has been director of an American firm developing real estate projects in Central European countries.

Winning is a habit, Success is a choice