Early Years, Peaks Pre-war
Vladimir Alexeyevich Alatortsev was an early Leningrad chess rival of Mikhail Botvinnik, who later became World Champion. However, Botvinnik, who was two years younger, established complete dominance over Alatortsev right from the start, and wound up with a 9-0 lifetime won-loss score with two games drawn.
Alatortsev's first important high-level result was an excellent shared 3rd-6th place in the Soviet Championship, Moscow 1931 (URS-ch07), with 10/17; Botvinnik won. Alatortsev was again runner-up to Botvinnik in the 1932 Leningrad Championship with 7/11. Alatortsev made his best Soviet Championship result in 1933 at Leningrad (URS-ch08), when he placed clear second with 13/19, as Botvinnik won his second title. At Tbilisi 1933, he tied for 1st-2nd places with Viktor Goglidze at 10/14.
Alatortsev shared the Leningrad title in 1933–34 with Georgy Lisitsin on 11/15. But he had a disappointing result in the 1934 Leningrad International with 4.5/11, as Botvinnik won to continue his dominance. He scored 7/13 in the Leningrad National tournament in May 1934 for 8th place, as Ilya Rabinovich won. In the 1934 Soviet Championship at Leningrad (URS-ch09), he scored 10.5/19 for a tied 5th-8th place; Grigory Levenfish and Ilya Rabinovich won. He earned a place in the 1935 Moscow International tournament, the strongest Soviet event since 1925, and finished with a very good even score of 9.5/19, as Botvinnik and Salo Flohr won.
Alatortsev drew a 12-game match (+4 =4 −4) with the very strong Hungarian Andor Lilienthal in 1935. He was jointly champion of Moscow in both 1936 and 1937. Then in the 1937 Soviet Championship at Tbilisi (URS-ch10), Alatortsev made 9.5/19 to tie 10th-12th places.
Alatortsev posted his second best pre-war result when he tied for 1st-2nd places with Leonid Shamaev in a strong tournament at Leningrad 1938, with 14/21, ahead of Lilienthal and Viacheslav Ragozin. Chessmetrics.com ranks this as a 2684 performance. In the Leningrad-Moscow tournament of 1939, Alatortsev tied for 9th-10th places on 9/17, as Flohr won.
He had to qualify for the next Soviet final, and in the semi-final at Kiev 1940, he scored 9.5/16 to tie for 4th-7th places, but did not advance to the final, losing out on tiebreak. Chessmetrics ranks him as #21 in the world for August 1940, with a rating of 2626.
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