FM Aras Vardanyan

23 year old chess enthusiast. I became a FIDE master in 2023 and am looking forward to going further towards the IM title. I also study criminology and am currently finishing off my bachelors degree. I've been playing chess since I was about 7 years old, but I took a "break" when I was 12. I came back at about 17 and haven't looked back since. I've also been coaching people of all ages for about 3 years now and I've recently received the official FIDE instructor coaching title, for which I am very proud.

I've been very active in tournaments of all time controls aswell as online chess for the last 6 years and I've been steadily improving. I am a big fan of ultra-dynamic openings such as the benko gambit, benoni defence, najdorf defence, modern defence, KID, etc. I believe playing such openings leads to many mistakes from which we can learn from. This approach has helped me reach a fairly high rating in a relatively short amount of time (1944 to 2220 FIDE classical in a year) and it's what I recommend that my students do.

I've had experience teaching groups of kids that are just starting out aswell as groups of adult beginners and amateurs alike. Now I only do private lessons with a handful of students ranging from 1400 to about 1800 FIDE. I've also had experience being a second to a few grandmasters.

I specialise in chess dynamics, tactical play, calculation, aswell as opening preparation.

My approach to every student is different, but one thing always stays the same - at least once a week we analyze the students' games which were played in long time controls (20+10, 30+20), mostly on lichess. The rest of the lessons are meant for training games or the patching up of certain weaknesses that me and the student have identified.