Francisco Vallejo Pons


Francisco Vallejo Pons is a Spanish chess grandmaster. He is a five-time Spanish Chess Champion.
He achieved the Grandmaster title at the age of 16 years and 9 months. He won the under-18 World Chess Youth Championship in 2000.
He won the Ciudad de Leon Masters after defeating Veselin Topalov 3½–2½.
In 2013 he tied for first at the European Individual Championship.

Notable games

On 25 February 2006 he defeated FIDE world champion Veselin Topalov in 56 moves with the black pieces at the SuperGM Linares-Morelia chess tournament.

Retirement and Return to Chess

After a painful loss in his penultimate round against Sergey Karjakin in the 2012 Bilbao Chess Masters Final, Vallejo announced his retirement from competitive chess.
Since then he has made multiple appearances in tournaments, for instance in 2014 Bilbao Chess Masters, as well as competed in country leagues.
Vallejo participated in the Grand Prix cycle for 2017–18, after being active in 2016. Having played in the Sharjah and Moscow legs of the event, and finished in the bottom half of the field in both, he had no mathematical chance to qualify for the 2018 Candidates Tournament via the Grand Prix.