Levon Aronian
- December 3, 2025
Participant in the 2007 World Championship and six-time Candidate Tournament participant
Ranking: World number two FIDE for a total of 29 months between 2012-2017
Highest FIDE Elo Rating: 2830
Tournament career: winner of 24 super-tournaments:
Chess World Cup 2005
Chess World Cup 2017
4x winner of Tata Steel Masters
3x winner of Tal Memorial
2x winner of Sinquefield Cup, Bilbao Chess Masters
winner of Linares Chess Tournament 2006, Norway Chess 2017, Palma de Mallorca 2017, Grenke Chess Classic 2017
and several others…
Chess Olympiads: for Armenia: three gold and one bronze team medals, one gold individual medal. For the USA: silver individual medal.
Why he deserves it:
Levon Aronian is still a playing chess legend even though he is over forty years old. He is a veteran who participated in the 2007 World Championship tournament (tied for sixth-seventh place out of eight) and also recorded a total of six participations in the Candidate Tournaments, the first in 2007 and the last so far in 2018. In the tournament format, he finished best in fourth place. Even though he never came close to the world champion title, he was consistently one of the strongest players in the world. It often seemed as if the thought of the chess king title weighed him down and he was unable to bring out his best. But when it wasn’t about the title, he won whatever he could.
He is the only player who managed to win the knockout World Cup twice, which was held recently. He won all the most prestigious super-tournaments he could win in his time, and most of them several times. He boasts titles from Tata Steel Masters, Sinquefield Cup, Norway Chess, Linares, and Tal Memorial. And many others. At the Chess Olympiads, he won gold team and individual medals.
He spent a long time in second place in the world rankings and his highest achieved rating of 2830 is the fourth highest in history, only behind Carlsen, Kasparov, and Caruana. Aronian shares a long-standing rivalry but also a long-term friendship and respect with Caruana. Caruana has often referred to Aronian as his closest friend among fellow grandmasters. Levon is generally a popular figure among both players and fans.
Best games:
Levon Aronian vs Magnus Carlsen
Norway Chess 2017
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Miroslav Janeček graduated in English Philology at Palacký University Olomouc. Currently he works in Prague as a content editor for a large marketing company. His roots are in Opava - the historic and cultural centre of the Czech part of Silesia. That city is also the home of Slezan Opava, the chess club where Miroslav started to play chess, later went on to work as a youth coach and which he to this day proudly represents. As an aspiring chess publicist, he is the main author of articles on ChessDB.cz. In his free time, in addition to chess and writing, he also devotes himself to racket sports, history, and literature.