Levon Aronian
From Chesspedia, the Free Chess Encyclopedia. that anyon can edit
Levon Aronian (born October 6, 1982) is an Armenian chess player. On the October 2005 FIDE list, he had an Elo rating of 2724, making him number ten in the world and Armenia's number one.
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. He has also been a regular particpant in the German Bundesliga and other team competitions; in the 2005 Russian Team Championship, for example, he scored +5 =3 -0 with an Elo performance rating of around 2850.
In 2003 Aronian won the Chess960 (Fischer Random) 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.
