Edoardo Di Benedetto IM

The Everlasting Blitz Regular

Edoardo Di Benedetto, better known to the internet as eragon02, is an International Master who approaches online chess the way some people approach a 24-hour diner: it is always open, the coffee is always hot, and he is always ready for one more game. His natural habitat is blitz, and the numbers confirm it. He can and will play for hours, often pushing even the most solid openings toward long, messy endgames.

He is comfortable both sides of the board and happy to dive into heavy theory, especially with the French Defense as Black or the Nimzo-Larsen Attack when he wants to steer the game away from the regular highway. He does not shy away from strange structures, and his opening repertoire reads like a menu full of extra sauce.

A Grinder With a Gambit Addiction

The eragon02 experience is never boring. His longest winning streak is 18, his longest losing streak is 13, and he responds to both with roughly the same response: queue up again. He wins nearly 47% of his games after losing material, and one-sided losses are rare for him. He is a grinder, not a quitter, and his decisive games often stretch past 90 moves.

• He has a 58-6-16 rapid record that looks like a typo, but it's real.
• His blitz peak hit 2940 (2025-03-22), while his bullet rating once touched the outrageous 3000 class.
• His rivalry with Manu David is fierce and spectacularly one-sided: 113 games, 77 losses, but he still keeps coming back.

Whatever he feels, he presses on. His

captures this open-minded personality better than any quote could.

Charting the Long Road

His blitz life is a long, wavy graph. From a 2600-class player in 2019, he worked his way higher, took a brief detour, then reused to junk into the 2700s, the 2800s, and occasionally the 2900s. The

is proof that he treats ratings like seasons: there are good peaks and wild storms, but the appetite for blitz never goes away.

At his best he is a nightmare for anyone with a tired clock: the early queen excursions are fine, the endgame crunch is ridiculous, and the comeback rate is one of the highest in the sample. He is, after all, Edoardo Di Benedetto, an elegant name for a player who spends his nights grinding out wins with rook and knight versus rook and a day plan.