6th USSR Championship — Odessa 1929

Incomplete record. This archive holds 65 games of this event; the others are missing, and the number played is not established.

The 6th USSR Championship was the first held away from Moscow and Leningrad, staged instead in the Black Sea port of Odessa. It ran as a sprawling knockout: 36 players in four qualifying groups, narrowing through two semifinals to a tiny final. Boris Verlinsky — deaf since a childhood bout of meningitis — came through it all to take the title, and for this victory he was named the first Grandmaster of the USSR. Most of the tournament's games are lost, and no complete cross table survives; the archive here gathers only the games that endure.

◇A championship in stages

For the sixth Soviet championship the organisers left the capitals behind and moved the event south to Odessa — the first time the national title had been contested outside Moscow or Leningrad. The format was unusually elaborate: 36 players were divided into four quarterfinal sections, with the top three of each advancing into two six-player semifinals. The two leaders of each semifinal were then to meet in a double round-robin final.

The field mixed established masters with a rising generation. Among those who took part were the 18-year-old Mikhail Botvinnik, the opening theorist Vsevolod Rauzer, the endgame specialist Nikolai Grigoriev, Peter Izmailov, Sergey von Freymann and Ilya Kan — a cross-section of Soviet chess as it was reorganising itself into a national institution.

◇A final of three

The planned four-player final was undone before it began: Peter Izmailov, one of the qualifiers, had to leave to sit his final university examinations. That left just three men to decide the championship — Verlinsky, Sergey von Freymann and Ilya Kan — in a double round-robin. Verlinsky dominated it, scoring 3½ points to von Freymann's 2 and Kan's ½, and took the title outright.

Because the event was fought in separate groups and stages rather than a single all-play-all, no unified cross table of the whole championship exists, and the great majority of its games have not come down to us. What survives is preserved here in stage order, a partial record of a tournament whose full detail is lost to history.

◇The grandmaster who lost his title

For winning at Odessa, Boris Verlinsky was awarded the newly created title of Grandmaster of the USSR — the very first man to hold it. The distinction did not last. In 1931 the title was abolished and Verlinsky's grandmastership was revoked; when the Soviet grandmaster title was reinstated later, it was Mikhail Botvinnik who became its first holder, and historians have long suspected the earlier cancellation was arranged with exactly that outcome in mind.

Verlinsky remained a formidable player regardless of titles. Over his career he beat opponents of the highest class, and he was made an International Master in 1950, the year of his death — a belated recognition for a player who had briefly, and uniquely, been the Soviet Union's first grandmaster.