ASHOT NADANIAN, (ARM), 2413, is a FIDE International Master and he has played in three Soviet Union Junior Chess Championships. He has played in forty international tournaments, including the World Chess Olympiad in Yerevan, where he lives, in 1996 and in the World Zonal Championship Tournament in Panormo in 1998, where he finished seventh out of seventy two participants, with the first four going to Las Vegas in 1999. He is 28 years old and for the last eight years he has been coaching chess and has received the title, "Honoured Coach of the Republic of Armenia." Among his students is a seventeen year old International Master and a Grand Master. Currently, he is working in Kuwait as the coach of the Kuwait National Team. The "Nadanian Variation," in the Gruenfeld Defense, is named after him: "1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5 4.cxd5 Nxd5 5.Na4," which he invented in 1996, which today is a well known variation played by many Grandmasters. His father taught him chess when Ashot was seven.
