USSR Championship Semifinal — Tula 1950

Tula produced the highest scores of the five semifinal groups feeding the 18th Soviet Championship: Yuri Averbakh and Georgy Borisenko finished level on 11½ from 15, two and a half points clear of the rest. Borisenko won nine games — more, Lev Abramov noted, than anyone among the eighty players in that year's semifinals. The third and last place in the Moscow final went to a tie-break, and to a young master from Tula itself. The archive here preserves 40 games from the section, a partial selection of the 120 the round robin produced.

◇The runaway group

Seven quarter-finals and five semifinals — Leningrad, Tula, Tartu, Kiev and Gorky — decided fifteen of the eighteen places in the Moscow final; only Paul Keres, Isaac Boleslavsky and Vasily Smyslov were seeded straight through. Nowhere was the gap between the leaders and the field as wide as at Tula. Averbakh came through the fifteen rounds unbeaten, with eight wins and seven draws, and Borisenko matched his 11½ with a still more violent record of nine wins and a single loss.

Then a long drop: Georgy Ilivitsky, Abram Polyak and Vladimir Simagin shared fifth on 8, German Fridstein made 7½, Nikolay Gusev 7. Andor Lilienthal — one of the grandmasters newly required to qualify rather than be invited — finished tenth on 6½ and did not get through, level on the rung above Grigory Goldberg, Genrikh Kasparian and the young Viktor Korchnoi, who shared eleventh to thirteenth on 6.

◇Suetin's breakthrough

Third place, and the last seat in the final, came down to the closing rounds. Oleg Moiseev lost his last two games and was caught on 9 by Alexey Suetin, who then took the place on tie-break coefficients — the same fate that befell Iogannes Veltmander in the Tartu group the same autumn. Suetin had beaten Lilienthal in the first round, the first time he had ever beaten a grandmaster, and he left Tula both a master and a finalist.

He remembered the sequel too: three weeks before the final began he was summoned to a training camp for the Russian Federation's qualifiers, where he and the masters Lev Aronin and Viktor Lyublinsky mostly rested, recovering from what he called the just-finished, difficult semifinal battles and admiring the autumn woods outside Moscow. In the final itself Suetin scored 6½ from 17, Averbakh 7, Borisenko 6½.

“It so happened that I not only became a master but also reached the final. I confess that I was inspired by my win over Lilienthal in the first round — it was the first time I had beaten a grandmaster.”

◇The surviving games

A sixteen-player round robin produces 120 games; this archive holds 40 of them, so no cross table is computed and the standings above come from the contemporary record rather than from the games below.

The contemporary reviewers singled out the loser of one of those games. Of Korchnoi, then still a Leningrad student, the championship report observed that there was much inventiveness and wit in his play, that he might have scored better had he not fallen into severe time trouble, and that he was inclined to overestimate his position.