Hans Moke Niemann

American GM

“I wanted to share a behind the scenes story of what the life of a chess player is really like. Before Wijk Aan Zee, I decided to stop in Vienna on the way to Wijk Aan Zee and I conveniently found a very reasonably priced business class ticket.

My trip started rather smoothly, I arrived to the airport early, but when I tried to enter the airport they asked me for a printed version of my boarding pass. I had no wifi, but thankfully a fan recognized me so I offered to take a photo if he shared his hotspot. Alas, I managed to enter the airport where after checking in they told me that because of an equipment shortage they changed aircrafts and had demoted me from business to economy.

I arrived in Abu Dhabi, and was looking forward to the far more comfortable seat on the flight to Vienna. However, shortly before arriving, the captain announced “10 minutes until landing”, but 30 minutes passed and we didn’t land. They eventually announced that due to the weather we had to circle Vienna until we got permission to land. After circling for an hour, the plan was to go to Munich but we were eventually rerouted to Frankfurt. Before we got off the plane in Frankfurt, they told us that the same plane would take us to Vienna at 8pm later that evening.

However, I saw that there was an 11:45 flight on an earlier airline so I booked that and thought that I could save time. Of course, 1 hour before it’s departure, it was cancelled, and all other flights to Vienna were full.

Lufthansa automatically rebooked me on a flight to Dusseldorf, and then to Vienna. I mean after 24h of travel, continuous cancellations, money wasted. I decided to take the flight to Dusseldorf then Vienna which eventually arrived at 7pm.

While you might think that this entire story is incredibly negative, this is actually a great omen for my future chess results. Whenever similar travel nightmares occurred, especially during the pandemic, amazing results would follow. So, the real moral of the story is that all of my bad luck is gone and that everything should hopefully go my way.”