A tournament is a competition involving a relatively large number of competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses:

These two senses are distinct. All golf tournaments meet the first definition, but while match play tournaments meet the second, stroke play tournaments do not, since there are no distinct matches within the tournament. In contrast, football (soccer) leagues like the Premier League are tournaments in the second sense, but not the first, having matches spread across many stadia over a period of up to a year. Many tournaments meet both definitions; for example, the Wimbledon tennis championship.

A tournament-match (or tie or fixture or heat) may involve multiple game-matches (or rubbers or legs) between the competitors. For example, in the Davis Cup tennis tournament, a tie between two nations involves five rubbers between the nations' players. The team that wins the most rubbers wins the tie. In the later rounds of UEFA Champions League of football (soccer), each fixture is played over two legs. The scores of each leg are added, and the team with the higher aggregate score wins the fixture, with away goals used as a tiebreaker and a penalty shootout if away goals cannot determine a winner.

Levon Grigor Aronian (Armenian: Լևոն Գրիգորի Արոնյան; born 6 October 1982) is an Armenian chess Grandmaster and the reigning World Blitz Chess Champion. On the May 2012 FIDE list, he had an Elo rating of 2825, making him number two in the world and third highest of all time.

Aronian won the Chess World Cup 2005. He led the Armenian national team to the Gold medals in the 2006 (Turin) and 2008 (Dresden) Chess Olympics and at the World Team Chess Championship in Ningbo 2011. He won the FIDE Grand Prix 2008–2010, qualifying him for the Candidates tournament for the World Chess Championship 2012, where he was knocked out in the first round. He was also the World Chess960 Champion in 2006 and 2007, the World Rapid Chess Champion in 2009, and is the current World Blitz Chess Champion.

Aronian was declared the best sportsman of Armenia in 2005 and was awarded the title of "Honoured Master of Sport of the Republic of Armenia" in 2009.

Aronian was born on 6 October 1982 in Yerevan, Armenia, to Seda Sarkisovna, a mining engineer and Grigory Leontievich, a physicist. He was taught to play chess by his sister Lilit at the age of nine. His first coach was the Grandmaster Melikset Khachiyan. An early sign of his ability came when he won the 1994 World Youth Chess Championship (under-12) in Szeged with 8/9, ahead of future luminaries Étienne Bacrot, Ruslan Ponomariov, Francisco Vallejo Pons, and Alexander Grischuk.

Boris Abramovich Gelfand (Belarusian: Барыс Абрамавіч Гельфанд; Hebrew: בוריס אברמוביץ' גלפנד‎; born 24 June 1968) is a Belarusian-born Israeli chess Grandmaster. He won the 2011 Candidates Tournament and faced World Champion Viswanathan Anand for the World Chess Championship 2012. Although the match was level at 6–6, Gelfand lost in the rapid tie break games.

Boris Gelfand was born in Minsk, Belarussian SSR, on 24 June 1968. His parents, Abram and Nella, were engineers. His father bought him a book about chess, Journey to the Chess Kingdom, by Averbakh and Beilin, when he was four years old. In 1980–1983, he attended the Tigran Petrosian School, where he met the former world champion in person and received advice that impacted on his life as a chess player: “I remember Petrosian saying to me that I shouldn’t make a single move without having an idea: ‘Even when you’re playing blitz, always think!’"

In 1998, Gelfand immigrated to Israel and settled in Rishon LeZion, where he became Israel's top ranking chess player. He is married to Maya.