AVRO 1938

In November 1938 the Dutch radio company AVRO brought the eight strongest players in the world to the Netherlands for a double round-robin meant to name Alexander Alekhine's next challenger. It was, at the time, the strongest tournament ever held. Paul Keres and Reuben Fine finished level on 8½/14, and Keres — the youngest man in the field — was awarded first place on tie-break. The championship match it was meant to produce never came: within a year Europe was at war.

◇A tournament to pick a challenger

AVRO — the Algemeene Vereeniging voor Radio Omroep, a Dutch broadcasting company — staged what was, by contemporary reckoning, the strongest tournament ever held. It gathered the eight best players in the world: World Champion Alexander Alekhine and every serious rival — José Raúl Capablanca, Max Euwe, Mikhail Botvinnik, Paul Keres, Reuben Fine, Samuel Reshevsky, and Salo Flohr. The stated aim was to produce a challenger for Alekhine's crown, though the event carried no official title status.

The format was gruelling. Each of the fourteen rounds was played in a different Dutch town — Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Groningen, Zwolle, Haarlem, Utrecht, Arnhem, Breda, Leiden — with the players moving on after every game. The constant travel told most on the two oldest men: Capablanca, who turned 50 during the tournament, and the 46-year-old Alekhine both finished well below expectations.

◇Keres and Fine, level at the top

The two youngest players in the field pulled clear. Paul Keres, 22, and Reuben Fine, 24, each scored 8½ from 14, a point ahead of the third-placed Botvinnik. Keres was awarded first place on tie-break: he held the better Sonneborn-Berger score and had also won their personal duel, taking their round-seven game and drawing the return for a 1½–½ head-to-head edge. In the final round the two met with the title all but settled, and their game was drawn.

Botvinnik's 7½ for clear third included the game he prized most — a round-eleven win over Capablanca that he later called "the game of my life." It was, for Capablanca, the only tournament of his career in which he lost more games than he won; he had gone into it unwell, and afterward blamed high blood pressure. Alekhine, Euwe, and Reshevsky shared fourth on 7, and the winless Flohr finished last.

“The game of my life.”

“It was a battle of ideas.”

◇The match that never came

AVRO was meant to be a gateway to the world title, but history intervened. War broke out within a year, and no challenger's match followed. Alekhine held the crown, unplayed-for, until his death in 1946. When FIDE finally organised a match-tournament for the vacant title in 1948, it invited the surviving AVRO players — six of them, Capablanca having died and Flohr replaced by the young Vasily Smyslov.

The tournament left a long shadow. Its double round-robin of the world elite became a template for the Candidates events of the 1950s, and Fine would later argue that he and Keres, as AVRO's co-leaders, had a claim to be considered champions of the title-less interregnum. Botvinnik, third here, would win the 1948 title and open two decades of Soviet dominance.