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Tag: Levon Aronian chess

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How a trip to Goa for a competition in the 90s resuscitated Levon Aronian’s chess career

When Levon Aronian allows his memory to waft back three decades — back to the early 1990s when he was a ‘skinny boy’ who would always be nibbling on chocolates during chess tournaments — he prefers to look at the start of his chess career and interpret himself as getting lucky.The time Aronian started playing chess was a tumultuous, almost anarchic, time to be in Armenia. The Soviet Union was rapidly crumbling. A bloody conflict raged between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. A devastating earthquake in 1988 had unleashed the fury of nature on the Armenians.To complicate matters for the Aronian family, independence from the Soviet Union meant that young Levon’s parents had to quit their highly-respected jobs at a time when electricity and water shortages were comm...