Pawn star: How the 'David Beckham of chess' became a national hero

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Photos:Levon Aronian: Armenia's chess champion

A brilliant mind – Levon Aronian is the fourth-best chess player on the planet. And in his native Armenia, that also makes him a national treasure.

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Photos:Levon Aronian: Armenia's chess champion

An intimate game – "What I really love about chess is it's kind of an art form, but at the same time you have a distinct level of judging who's better and who's worse -- which is the rating system," said Aronian.

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Photos:Levon Aronian: Armenia's chess champion

Mental stamina – "I've played a couple seven, eight-hour games. Consider the fact that you also train for three hours, generally, before the game. So it's an 11-hour working day," he added.

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Photos:Levon Aronian: Armenia's chess champion

Female players – "Women are generally weaker than men at chess, because they are told from a very young age: 'Oh honey, you lost, you're a girl, it's OK.' So it's also a psychological thing," said Aronian.The chess champion believes women should play with men."When you limit women to playing against each other, that creates a disbalance. Every woman who stopped playing against women, and started against men, became a much stronger player."

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Photos:Levon Aronian: Armenia's chess champion

Magnus' match – The world's No. 1 chess player Magnus Carlsen (pictured left playing Aronian, in 2008), has said the Armenian is one of his toughest opponents."There are several players who I find it difficult to play against. Probably the most difficult is Aronian," Carlsen told CNN. "I have a pretty good score against him, but he's probably outplayed me more times than anyone else at the top."

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Photos:Levon Aronian: Armenia's chess champion

From young... – Chess has been compulsory in all Armenian schools since 2011."Generally, it's good for children to learn any sport," said Aronian."But the advantage of chess is very specific, the fact that you're not challenged physically, so nobody has an advantage from the start."

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Photos:Levon Aronian: Armenia's chess champion

... to old – "Chess is a wonderful game - two players face off without third party intervention in an ultimate battle of the mind," said Professor Aram Hajian, dean at the College of Science and Engineering at the American University of Armenia, and co-founder of the Chess Academy of Armenia."Creativity meets calculation, psychology meets planning, and strategy is peppered with tactics, all in a game that is played in practically every country on Earth."

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Photos:Levon Aronian: Armenia's chess champion

Tigran Petrosian – The moment Armenian Tigran Petrosian beat Soviet Mikhail Botvinnik to become 1963 World Chess Champion (a title he held until 1969), has been likened JFK's assassination in America -- everyone in Armenia remembers where they were at the time.

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Story highlights

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(CNN)When Levon Aronian walks down the street in his native Armenia he's met by cheering crowds; restaurants insist he eats for free; new parents name their babies after him.

Aronian isn't an actor, activist, or astronaut. He's a chess player -- the fourth best in the world, to be precise. And in this tiny, ex-Soviet, chess-obsessed country, that means he's also a national hero.

"The first time my fiancée arrived in Armenia we stopped at one petrol station and they said, 'OK, we're not going to charge you,'" says the 33-year-old dubbed "The David Beckham of Armenia" by the foreign press.

"So for her this is pretty shocking -- but that happens all the time," he adds, referring to his Australian girlfriend Arianne Caoili, an international chess champion in her own right whose good looks have spurred the nickname "The Anna Kournikova of Chess."

The red carpet treatment of players isn't so far-fetched in a country where chess is compulsory in all schools. Here, even the nation's President Serzh Sargsyan is also President of the Armenia Chess Federation.

"I won't be humble about that," he adds with a cheeky laugh. And while Aronian may not have the swagger of a footballer like Beckham, his playful and sincere charm has only endeared him to a country of chess-fanatics.

Home-schooled by his scientist parents in what was then the Soviet Union, Aronian was taught to play chess by his sister as a nine-year-old -- and turned pro the same year.

These days the chess prodigy spends around four hours a day training. He usually travels seven months a year -- playing at international tournaments offering anywhere between a few thousand and over a million dollars in prize money.

"Chess is like any kind of sport, but taken into a little cage where you have to understand how his brain works, how his blood flows" -- Levon Aronian.

Armenian grandmasters are also paid around $120 per month from the government -- a symbolic sum which nonetheless sets it apart from the rest of the world.

But to really understand the country's love of chess, you must head to the streets.

The moment Petrosian beat Soviet Mikhail Botvinnik to become 1963 world chess champion (a title he held until 1969), has been likened JFK's assassination in America -- everyone in Armenia remembers where they were at the time.

"The collective euphoria that the nation experienced was a real watershed moment for the Armenian people," Hajian says of the games, which were projected onto giant screens and watched by thousands in the capital Yerevan's Opera Square.

"At the time, Armenia was one of the smallest constituent republics of the Soviet Union. While national expression was discouraged by the Soviet authorities, the rise of Tigran Petrosian galvanized the spirit of the Armenian nation."

For a country with such a tumultuous history -- including one of the most horrific massacres of the 20th century -- chess has now also become an important source of Armenian national pride.

"We're not just a nation of people who struggle and fight. We're also a nation of people who can come back to the days of our glory when we were a big country, a country who set new rules," Aronian says.

"When you travel to Armenia you see all those monasteries, all those universities that are 1,500 years old and you always feel 'this is what we are.' We have been a nation that had a lot of intellectual capability.

"So I think what drove people to chess, is to bring back the feeling that we were once a scientific nation."