Soviet Union-United States radio chess match of 1945

This was a landmark team chess contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, played entirely by radio from 1 to 4 September 1945 at the end of the Second World War. Each side fielded its ten leading masters and played a two-game head-to-head match, the Americans gathering at the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York and the Soviet players at the Central Club of Art Masters in Moscow. Moves were sent in the Uedemann Code and took about five minutes each to transmit, with a time control of forty moves in two and a half hours. The Soviet team won by fifteen and a half points to four and a half. The result astonished the chess world, because American teams had won four straight Chess Olympiads from 1931 to 1937 while the Soviet Union had stayed away, and it marked the point from which Soviet players dominated international chess for much of the twentieth century.