The tournament was a double Round-robin event. Players were assigned one point for every win and a half-point for each draw. In later years, Bronstein claimed that the Soviet players were accompanied by KGB agents. According to Bronstein, during the tournament, the KGB handlers started to worry that the American candidate, Samuel Reshevsky, would win, and began pressuring some of the Soviet players to throw their games against Smyslov, who was leading the other Soviet players in points.
