Bonjour!
Our first tournament of the year started with both of us winning the first round! This was our second time playing in Vandoeuvre les-nancy, I think we had a decent performance this time, we both scored 5 points out of 9 rounds with Tarun beating a GM and drawing against one GM and I won against two IMs, I missed a WGM norm by half a point and an IM norm by 1 point. It’s a bit upsetting that I was so close to getting a norm and I missed it by a whisker. I will try to learn from my mistakes and try harder next time.
Intrestingly my opponent bounced back after this loss against me and came joint first in the tournament! Even after he lost the game, he was eager to analyze the game and find out where he went wrong. That shows his sportsmanship!
Tarun showed good technique in the queen endgame to convert his advantage.
It was quite a strong field, with 5 players coming joint first scoring 7 points. Due to better tie breaks IM Vlachos Anatole from Greece won the tournament.
We didn’t get a chance to explore the city as we had two rounds every day but we got to interact with the people there in our broken French!
After the prize giving we rushed back to our hotel and got our bags and we sprinted to the Nancy Gare station to catch our train to Paris. We managed to catch the train luckily but the travel drama didn’t end there, from there we took two metros to reach Porte Malliot, we planned to take an airport shuttle there which directly takes us to Paris BVA airport but on arriving there we got to know that we missed the last bus going to the airport.
The next bus to the airport was at 3 am so we passed our time in a nearby McDonald’s which was open till 2 am.
After hours of waiting, we got our bus to the airport and after two hours of waiting more we finally flew to Dublin. Travelling is challenging at times but that’s what makes it more exciting!