The instant notification system has been completely rewritten to use Push instead of Pull based notifications. This means notifications are sent straight to your web browser instead of it having to poll the server for updates. There are two main benefits to this new approach:

1. Notifications are now almost immediate (testing indicates it takes about 1 second for notifications to be received) as opposed to up to a minute with the old system. You should notice in particular that updates to your turn counter occur almost instantly.

2. Reduced server load (and hence a faster gaming experience) due to complete elimination of regular polling activity.

As part of this update game event notifications have been added. This means instant notifications when a game that you have joined has started and when you are eliminated, skipped or booted. I will be adding notification of championship point change notifications in the near future. If you don't want these (they're enabled by default) you can turn them off via the Settings -> Notifications page.

Wow!  Real-time play.  Very nice.  Add clocks to the mix and lightning will mean lightning.

Yep this all ties into the clock system that is forthcoming as the server can now update the clock running in your browser directly. 

Nice, but now with only 1 turn waiting, it shows 3 turns waiting, then 4, then 5, then 4, then 3, then 4, then 5, then 3, then 4... Weird isn't it ?

Odd, I'll look into it.