The hall in which the 12th Championship was held had excellent acoustics so the players suffered with noise from the audience. Botvinnik, who was leading after nine rounds, felt his performance was being affected by these conditions and he ended up in shared fifth and sixth places with Boleslavsky behind Bondarevsky and Lilienthal who were joint first, Smyslov third and Keres fourth.

After receiving a letter from Botvinnik and working behind the scenes, chess organiser (and keen Botvinnik supporter) Vladimir Nikolayevich Snegiryov persuaded the authorities that a Match – Tournament of the first six place-getters would be a fairer determination of the Champion (and hence Challenger for Alyekhin), rather than the proposed winner of the Bondarevsky-Lilienthal Match play-off.

So the Match – Tournament was a twenty-round affair, with the first ten rounds held in the Tauride Palace (1) in Leningrad and last ten rounds played in the Hall Of Columns in Moscow. It started on the 23rd of March and ran until the 29th of April. Botvinnik ran out the convincing winner.