Levon Aronian of Armenia and Hikaru Nakamura (U.S.) share the second spot in the list of world's strongest chess players compiled by theUniversal Rating System.

The URS was developed as a result of a collaborative research project funded by the Grand Chess Tour, the Kasparov Chess Foundation and the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis.

There are now four players with a URS rating in excess of 2800 and these players are GM Magnus Carlsen (2867), GM Hikaru Nakamura (2803), Aronian (2803) and GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (2802).

The URS calculates a single overall rating for every chess player which is optimized to represent their strength at classical chess based upon their game results across all time controls.