Nobody believes 50 Cent will actually retire now that he's lost the much-hyped showdown with Kanye West over first-week sales of their new albums.

But Curtis Jackson sure does have some egg on his face.

West's Graduation trounced 50's Curtis in first-week sales, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with a whopping 957,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That number trounced the 691,000 units moved by Fiddy in the first week, as well as many people's pick for dark horse in country star Kenny Chesney's Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates, which sold 387,000 last week.

Graduation is the biggest-selling album so far this year, as well as the best single-week sales tally of any album since, ironically, 50 Cent's The Massacre opened with 1.1 million copies in March 2005. West's own August 2005 album, Late Registration, was the last album to surpass 800,000 copies when it began with 860,000.

Graduation also landed the largest week yet by a digital album download, starting with 133,000, which beat the prior record of 102,000, set earlier this year by Maroon 5's It Won't Be Soon Before Long.

The duel between 50 and Kanye was the most hyped music story of the year, and it had the desired effect for Universal Music Group, which owns the labels of both artists, Island/Def Jam and Interscope, respectively.

The double punch from the two albums marks only the second time since Nielsen SoundScan began charting album sales in 1991 that two albums have bowed in the same week with totals surpassing 600,000 copies.

Although his last four studio albums had debuted at No. 1, Chesney's sales tally was the largest sales week for a country album since the May 2006 arrival of Dixie Chicks' Taking the Long Way, which opened with 526,000 copies.

The trio of albums finally pushed the soundtrack to Disney's High School Musical 2 off the top perch, where it had remained for four straight weeks.

HSM 2 now sits at No. 4 with 133,000 copies sold last week, followed by another Disney soundtrack, Miley Cyrus' double-disc set Hannah Montana 2 (Soundtrack)/Meet Miley Cyrus, which ranked No. 5 with 42,000 units sold.