Nortrom's Stratego (and other topics) blog

Day #4 (Monday) With as little as 2 hours of sleep, we grabbed a breakfast, which actually was surprisingly good. I had something with banana, bread and sugar. At first, it did not look that tasteful but I decided to give it a try anyway and liked it so much that I even ended up taking a second one. We, again, did not want to try out luck and ordered a taxi which drove us to the airport. We arrived quite early, but well, better than too late for obvious reasons. Upon arriving at the airport, we decided to just go to the gates as soon as possible. Somehow, both of us were picked for a security check. Fun! The guy in front of us also was picked out. Upon going through some detection device, an alarm went off for him (and it did too for Dennis and me). Amazing, just what we were waiting for. They took some weird thing and put it on my shoes, hands, chest and then analyzed it.. and determined that nothing was found (same for Dennis and the other, unknown, guy) and we could continue. St...

Day #3 (Sunday) After a decent rest I woke up and had a good breakfast full of mostly sweets. As we hadn't really made plans of travel arrangement, Dimitrios (Don mitsos) offered us a ride to the playing venue. As we arrived at the playing venue, it was good to see everyone present again. My first game of the day and thus fourth of the tournament would be against John Vandoros. I preferred to play him at round 3, day 1, opposed to round 4 (round #1 of that day), day 2. During the game I was looking at an early deficit the entire game, I did manage to equalize it, but at the expense of some information giving the initiative to John. I was not really as sharp as I need to be in a game like that and after some back and forth, John managed to make a decisive strike. After the game I felt a bit of a void, after all, on paper, this should have been the most promising game. The fifth round, after the game against John, I was matched up against his father, Spyros Vandoros. A great op...

Day #2 (Saturday) The day started off by taking a quick shower, followed by breakfast and later exploring the area a bit more. Our driver, Greg, whom I have to say, is a responsible and good driver (if I wouldn't write a positive review I would have to walk to Patras.. 😊) picked us up and Charlie (TheOptician) was there already too'as he stayed with Greg. Greg picked up one more person, Ioannis (Périgord) in Athens and our journey to Patras took off. During the trip to Patras, Ioannis seemed to be quite knowledgeable about the landscape and happily told us, in detail, about the mountains, what area we were in, etc. If you ever need a guide in Greece, ask Ioannis 😊. Greece was nothing how I expected it, I expected things to be flat, like in the Netherlands, but the opposite was true, we were driving through mountain-like areas all the time and also came across some places that had forest fires previously. While it was fascinating to see the difference between an alive fore...

Before the actual story, as also mentioned within the small speech, I'd like to extend my sincere and great gratitude to Patras Stratego team, and especially Georgios Trypanagnostopoulos for the special invitation, as well as the work done to organize this wonderful event. For those who were not present, when physically there, it is very obvious that those talented organisers had put in a lot of effort into organizing a wonderful event, something they for sure succeeded at (almost like a spoiler..). Some tournaments you participate to win, some you participate to experience. This tournament was mostly the experience for me. I always am either "there to have fun" or "in it to win it" and sometimes those two are combined. While of course winning the tournament would have been marvelous, it was not really my main concern. Catching up with some old friends, meeting new people and of course meeting those whom I've interacted with online were my main concern and...