What it feels like to play a grandmaster: my experience

Many of chess enjoyers around the world can only dream to at least meet a real grandmaster. There are around 3500 of them worldwide, and even meeting an ordinary gm is an honor, because not every country has its own chess professionals. Only around 40 of them are known as super-grandmasters, who play at the best and highest-rated tournaments with the biggest public attention and amount of fans.
In my life I have met two grandmasters. And I am lucky enough to tell you about how it feels to play chess OTB with a real grandmaster.
Well, I purposefully didn’t google anything about him before the meeting (I only heard a lot). I’d easily overestimate his traits if I did that. Also I’m just trying to treat all the people equally, so I didn’t want to please his ego. I didn’t want to become just another fan.
As a person obsessed with chess since the childhood, I can say that it's always a pleasure to play chess with a professional, especially a gm. Your result mostly depends on your aptitude to the game. Even though you have almost zero chances to win, you can have some advantage in an unformal atmosphere( if you don’t drink, but your friend does), and the biggest possibility to win is to flag him on time (I didn’t manage, he’s so fast!).
So if you take the game seriously and play mindfully, you can avoid blundering for some first time, like around 14 moves. But that’s not what I did... I was playing for fun.
At that times, when we met first, I was terribly bad at Ruy Lopez (not much has changed). I only knew like 5-6 first moves and that was all of my prep.You can see it here, in the game.
https://lichess.org/AMqw4Q7d/black
Mistake on move 7, blunder at move 9. I started laughing a second after spotting my own blunder. He easily used it to get the win.
But he said he enjoyed the game, and that I’ve been defending greatly, until he managed to apply some light tactics to fully crash my position. In 29 moves...
What I remember about that day, is I never laughed that much while playing, I was full of positive emotions. It was sort of “in-how-many-moves-do-you-mate-me”. What’s funny, his friend, the other gm, was sitting the next table and eating many...I said MANY sweets, and rustling the sweets’ wrappers, just like a hamster. Now we call him the hamsta-masta ( the Hamster Master).

Actually, I wanted to tell you about some other of our games, but I have saved the paper of my game with that hamster-gm next table. And I’ll put it here.
It was on the same day, after we had some tea and desserts with the first gm. I kind of relaxed a bit after game one, and became more serious. I played the Black again, so I decided to apply one of the most complex openings for me – the Sicilian.
This grandmaster won me after 44 moves, as I didn’t want to screw up quickly in front of the first one. You can see it here.
https://lichess.org/hvnzSHIb
All in all, after meeting them and making friends for few times later I understood that I don’t want to become a grandmaster anymore. I’ve seen how much more they love chess, or it became their habit to do 6 hours of chess a day. I wouldn’t be enough to put this much effort: I wanna do my researches, play piano, sing, draw, read and many other things besides chess. And I feel happy doing all of it, only one wouldn’t be enough.
So now chess is just one of my hobbies, I am not willing to become a professional anymore. What stays true about chess, that it is the wisest and most interesting game of all times, and people, who play it are smart, interesting and fun.