Is that "40" or "40,000"?

40k would indicate quite a lot of sales to date... I wonder who the #1 is :) 

40.000 yes, and just some nerd who has played like 500 matches already is Nr.1 i was rank 820 yesterday, still nice =), played about 80 matches now.

500 matches in one day??? How long is each match?

If it is like the one before, that rocks by the way, 5 minuts. That is 5 minuts of pure action

Thats 41 hours of play in 2 days - yes - thats an uber nerd. :)

Nintendo's servers in Europe have been too slow since the very first day (Okay let's say at least until 3 January when I first went online with my Wii).

are they online again or do they still have problems?

well, i myself are not facing that many problems, just sometimes the statistics refuse to show so you get disconnected, but im sure these are just some minor problems that will be fixed, we are the sort of testers for you americans :P. i believe it's 3 minutes btw.. in series of 3.

Just about every successful online game has had problems during the launch period. This is because server load is so different than the long term average. If they are still having problems a week from now, then I'd be worried.

I´m playing it right now and the first day was the only one to have the errors, since the Wii is the first Nintendo console to reallygo online I´d say its a big succes, so there were problems the first day, big deal, everybody was screaming OH MY GOD THE FRIEDS CODES ARE COMMING, again big deal, if I wan´t to play a friend I´ll get his code and if not I´ll just play a random player who has about as many points as me. Why would I want to chat with someone I don´t know anyway, even I might get carried away and start mooking a six year old, and that would be totally uncool.