During his reign as world champion, Kramnik never regained the world number-one ranking, doing so only in January 2008 after he had lost the title to Viswanathan Anand; as in 1996, Kramnik had the same FIDE rating as Anand (2799) but became number one due to more games played within the rating period. Kramnik's 12 years between world number-one rankings is the longest since the inception of the FIDE ranking system in 1971.
