Levon Aronian

Levon Aronian was born on October 6, 1982 in Armenia. An early sign of his ability came in 1994 when he won the World Under-12 Championship in Szeged with a score of 8/9. He finished ahead of future stars like Etienne Bacrot, Ruslan Ponomariov, Francisco Vallejo Pons and Alexander Grischuk. In 2002 he became World Junior Champion, scoring 10/13 and finishing ahead of Luke McShane, Surya Ganguly, Artyom Timofeev, Bu Xiangzhi, Pntala Harikrishna, and others.

In 2003, Aronian won the Chess960 (Fischer Random) Open at Mainz. This win qualified him for a match against the Chess960 "World Champion" Peter Svidler at Mainz the following year. He lost the match 4.5-3.5. In 2004, he made it to the 3rd round of the FIDE World Championship before being ousted by Pavel Smirnov.

Aronian was part of a five-way tie for 1st place at the 2005 Gibtele.com Masters in Gibraltar with Zahar Efimenko, Kiril Georgiev, Alexei Shirov and Emil Sutovsky. In December of 2005, he defeated Ruslan Ponomariov in the final round of the World Cup in Khanty Mansiysk, Russia. After a draw in two regular games, he won both rapid games to take the crown and emerge undefeated in seven rounds.

In March of 2006, Aronian finished in 1st place at the annual Linares chess tournament, half a point ahead of Teimour Tadjabov and FIDE World Champion Veselin Topalov. On the April 2006 FIDE rating list, he had an ELO rating of 2756 making him number thre in the world, and Armenia's number one.

Download 190 chess games by Levon Aronian

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