Well folks, some of you may not be chess fiends. But tonight and for the next two nights even you may be intrigued to pop in and watch world championship blitz tourney. Players have 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move each. So they've got to get a wriggle on. And they are stupendously good. Watching it's just amazing how many things they can keep in their head at any one time as they race through the games. 14 tonight. 14 tomorrow night. 10 on Thursday night.

Here are the players. And their ratings (I presume) are their blitz ratings. So enjoy. The official website is in Russian but translated seamlessly by Google if you want.  I'm watching the live cam right now and the players are being announced - how amazing.

And you can watch the games live.  They should be up on this amazing site, where you can look at all the latest big tourneys. For normal tourneys where players get two hours for forty moves, it also displays computer analysis alongside the live game which enables you to figure out who's winning, why and what the best continuations are (in the opinion of Stockfish which is a fairly seriously good computer program.)  But I've not verified how it works for this tourney - though it's there so it should work fine. If not, check out the page of the official site for live games.

Enjoy!  It's an amazing world. We're an amazing species. Don't let anyone give you that crap about how chimps are just like us.  They're not.  Trust me.