Fast, faster and fastest chess

I've done my bit for traditional game shows. So now it's on to chess shows. Like yesterday's death match on chess.com.

For those of you who don't know - which is undoubtedly just about all of you - the website chess.com sponsors three-hour online blitz matches between chess masters every month or so. Yesterday I watched a couple of grandmasters duke it out: Alexander Ipatov, originally from Ukraine and now playing for Turkey(?), and American Marc Arnold.

These death matches feature five-minute games, then three-minute games, and then the ultimate, bullet chess or one-minute games. Somehow the Ipatov-Arnold match went into quadruple overtime. Ipatov was one game down but tied the match in a buzzer-beater, the last game in regular time. Then came three excruciating draws. Finally, Arnold got a pair of queenside passed pawns to win the fourth sudden-death game and the match.

International master Danny Rensch, who runs the site, provided quick-witted commentary on the games, along with English IM Lawrence Trent. The games flew by so fast that these guys often ended up talking really, really quick. So you had to know a little about chess notation (and the rules of the game) to follow along.