Holt Takes 4th Blitz "Death Match"

This weekend Chess.com hosted its fourth Blitz Death Match. The two participants -- IM Eric Hansen and GM-Elect Conrad Holt -- earned their way into the match via a long qualification process that required them to play hundreds of blitz and/or bullet games on our Live Server. You can read more about this process at IM David Pruess's blog here!

The match was close throughout, with the slight favorite on paper pulling through in the end. After the first segment of 5 minutes with 1 second increment, the match was tied 4-4. Conrad managed to squeeze a two game lead (5.5-3.5) out of the 3 minutes with 1 second increment time control, and he repeated that performace in the bullet segment of 1 minute with a 1 second increment to win the match by four games total, 15 to 11. 

Here are some of the more interesting games from the match (one from each time control). 

Conrad's first win of the match came as black in game 1 of the 5 minute time control:

Eric won a nice game in the 3 minute time control here:

With the final "clincher" game of the match being:

You can check out our Chess.com/TV Coverage by going here and clicking the "videos" tab on the upper right!

Congrats one more time to our winner, GM-Elect Conrad Holt!