Armenia is chess’s perennial overachiever, & Levon Aronian, its greatest player, is a swashbuckling throwback.

In 1963, when Petrosian took on the Russian Mikhail Botvinnik for the World Championship, thousands camped out in Yerevan, watching each move relayed via telegraph to a giant demonstration board in the city’s Opera Square. Petrosian’s victory caused a “chess boom” in the country, Mikayel Andriasyan, the secretary-general of the A.C.F., told me. In recent years, when Armenia has won the Chess Olympiad, there have been similar celebrations. (Armenia did not compete at last year’s Olympiad, because it was staged in the Azerbaijani capital city, Baku: the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remains unresolved.) Levon Aronian (above picture) played a key role in all of those victories: in 2004, Serzh Sargsyan, a former....

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/28981cbe-9e58-32e9-9493-9cbeef840c5b/ss_a-chess-master-with-an.html