In May 2018, Chess.com announced that it had acquired the 3300+ Elo-rated commercial chess engine Komodo, then ranked 3rd behind Stockfish and Houdini. In conjunction, the Komodo team announced the addition of the probabilistic method of Monte Carlo tree search machine-learning, the same methods used by promising recent chess projects AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero. Chess grandmaster and Komodo co-creator Larry Kaufman said of the merge that  The entire Komodo team joined in the acquirement and are now working together with Chess.com developers and technology. Chess.com regularly holds and sponsors prize tournaments and matches often containing the world's best players. Death Matches are one of Chess.com's oldest formats, beginning in January 2012, whereby titled players are paid to play a series of blitz games over a non-stop 3-hour period (5-minute, 3-minute(default for new users along with 5-minute game) and 1-minute, all with a one-second increment). To date, there have been 38 deathmatches, the participants of which include the likes of top grandmasters such as Hikaru Nakamura, Dmitry Andreikin, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Lê Quang Liêm, Wesley So, Fabiano Caruana, Judit Polgár and Nigel Short.Default time for new users joining via uplinks or referrals may not have options to select the time and traverse between 1 to 10-minute of game. The USCL was a nationwide national chess league in the United States between 2005 and 2016. Chess.com started hosting the event in 2013 when USCL commissioner Greg Shahade decided that Titled Tuesday is a 10-round Swiss-system 3+2 blitz chess tournament held on the first Tuesday of each month. Many super-grandmasters have participated, such as Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Alexander Grischuk, Dmitry Andreikin, Wesley So, Fabiano Caruana and it is widely considered one of the strongest online tournaments. The first event was held on October 28, 2014, with a prize fund of $500 and was won by Baadur Jobava. The prize fund was eventually upgraded to $1500. GM Hikaru Nakamura has won the most events with a total of eight tournament wins, followed by GM Georg Meier with seven, Magnus Carlsen has won three of the events in which he has partaken.