LEVON ARONIAN

'Levon Aronian' (born October 6 1982) is an Armenian chess player. On the July 2007 FIDE list, he had an Elo rating of 2750, making him number eight in the world and Armenia's number one.

Contents

Career

Chess960

Notable games

References

External links

Career

An early sign of his ability came when he won the 1994 World Under-12 championship in Szeged with 8/9, ahead of future luminaries including 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, Pentala Harikrishna and others.
In 2004 he progressed to the 3rd round of the 2004 FIDE World Championship before being knocked out by Pavel Smirnov.
In 2005 he was part of a five-way tie for first place at the Gibtele.com Masters in Gibraltar with Zahar Efimenko, Kiril Georgiev, Alexei Shirov and Emil Sutovsky. In the 2005 Russian Team Championship, he scored +5 =3 - 0 with an Elo performance rating of around 2850.
In December 2005 Levon Aronian beat Ruslan Ponomariov of Ukraine in the final round to win the World Cup in Khanty Mansiysk, Russia. After a draw in two regular games, Aronian won both Rapid games to win the event and emerge undefeated in seven rounds.
In March 2006 he took sole first place at the annual Linares chess tournament, half a point ahead of Teimour Radjabov and FIDE World Champion Veselin Topalov.
In January 2007 Aronian shared first place at the 19th category Corus chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee along with Topalov and Radjabov.
In May 2007 he defeated World Champion Vladimir Kramnik 4-2 in a rapid chess match.^[1]
His 2005 World Cup victory qualified him for the Candidates Tournament of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2007, being played in May-June 2007. In this tournament he played GM Magnus Carlsen, and they played 3-3 in the initial six games, then 2-2 in the rapid chess, and finally Levon Aronian won 2-0 in the blitz chess. After this victory he met Alexei Shirov in the finals, who he defeated 3.5-2.5 in 6 games. This qualifies him for the final stage of the championship, which will be played in Mexico.

Chess960

In 2003 Aronian won the Finet Chess960 open at Mainz; this qualified him for a match against Chess960 "World Champion" Peter Svidler at Mainz the following year, a match which he lost 4.5-3.5. He won the Finet Chess960 open tournament again in 2005 which earned him a rematch with Svidler in 2006, and won the match this time 5-3 to become Chess960 World Champion.
In 2007 he successfully defended his title of Chess960 World Champion by beating Viswanathan Anand.

Notable games

Aronian, as Black, defeats GM Ivan Sokolov (2676) in 19 moves, using all of 10½ minutes on his clock to do so [1]: I. Sokolov-Aronian, Chess Olympiad, Turin 2006 '1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.Qc2 d5 5.cxd5 exd5 6.Bg5 c5!? 7.dxc5 h6 8.Bh4 g5 9.Bg3 Ne4 10.Bxb8!?' (10.e3; 10.Be5) 'Qf6!' (10...Rxb8?? 11.Qa4+ +-) '11.Bg3 Nxc3 12.a3 Bf5! 13.Qd2 Ba5 14.b4? Ne4 15.Qc1 Rc8!! 16.Ra2?! Rxc5 17.Qa1' (see diagram at right) 'Qc6!' The threat of back-rank mate is crushing. '18.Qe5+ Kd8 19.Qxh8+ Kd7 0-1'
If 20.e3, Rc1+ 21.Ke2 Bg4+! and 22...Qc4# (based on analysis by A.J. Goldsby)

References

1. Drama in Yerevan – Aronian wins Rapid match 4:2, Chessbase, 7-May-2007

External links

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