Aronian climbing the ladder!

Levon Aronian. Photo from chessbase.com

Armenian top player - Levon Aronian who was once punch by an English GM,  is fast climbing the world top list ladder. In the current official list (FIDE November list), Aronian hit his highest place ever - number three. However in the Live Rating list which was maintained daily by Hans Arild Runde, Aronian is now no.2! This is possible thanks to his excellent performance in the ongoing  Tal Memorial which he lead with 3 points after round 4 last night. Ten Super GM participated in this tournament. ( Aronian, Kramnik, Grischuk, Mamedyarov, Karjakin, Wang Hao, Eljanov, Gelfand, Nakamura and Shirov). The official site is in Russian but you can help yourself by google translate it to English.

Among his victims is ex-World Champ and now world no.4 - Vladimir Kramnik, and last night he beat experience top player - Boris Gelfand. So far, only Wang Hao (China) and Mamedyarov (Azerbaijan) manage to split the point with Aronian.

From my observation, Aronian had one unique style. He belong to a small group of players who like to move the piece and write the move with different  hand. If you noticed , he move the piece with his left hand and use his right hand to write the move. I don't know the advantage of this style but i guess he loved to utilized all his resources :)

Unfortunately to one of my favourite player - Alexei Shirov - Mr. fire on board, he had a tough tournament so far. He has lost three games and drew one against Karjakin last night.  He is now at the bottom of the table with Pavel Eljanov who also had the same score.