Moscow Championship 1942

◈Chess amid the war

The 1942 championship of Moscow was played while the Soviet Union was locked in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. International chess had all but stopped, yet inside the USSR the game endured — and the capital's own title, whose recent holders included some of the country's very best players, was still contested. Sixteen players fought a single round-robin of fifteen rounds, 120 games in all.

The field was strong for a city event, drawing established masters alongside the coming generation: Smyslov, Boleslavsky, Kotov and Andor Lilienthal at the top, with Vasily Panov, Ilya Kan, Georgy Lisitsin and Evgeny Zagoriansky filling out the leading places. Smyslov himself, whose weak eyesight had kept him from military service, was free to play through the war years.

◈Smyslov runs clear

Smyslov's result was decisive: 10 wins, 4 draws and just one loss for 12 points from 15 games. Boleslavsky pressed him hardest and finished second on 11, with Kotov and Lilienthal sharing third and fourth on 10½. Panov took fifth on 9½ and Kan sixth on 9, leaving Lisitsin and Zagoriansky level on 8.

Only 21 years old — he had been recognised as a Soviet grandmaster the year before — Smyslov turned the Moscow title into a statement of arrival. He would hold the city championship again in 1943 and 1944, and within a decade he stood among the best players in the world.

◈Where it led

The young winner's rise did not slow. Smyslov took second behind Mikhail Botvinnik at the 1944 Soviet Championship, won the USSR title outright in 1949, and won the great 1953 Candidates tournament at Zürich. He challenged Botvinnik three times, and in 1957 he defeated him to become the seventh World Chess Champion. Moscow 1942 was one of the first tournaments to show what he could do.