Why Go is Better Than Chess
I started playing Go, the ancient east asian board game, in November. I’ve been having a lot of fun diving deeper into the game and it has been a great outlet for my self-improving/competitive side. The game is often very intimidating to people (it certainly was to me a few years ago), but I consider this a bit of a PR move from Go players who like to say they play a hard game. It’s certainly hard, deep, and you will get crushed by more experienced players in ways you could never imagine, but those are descriptors that fit pretty much every successful competitive game. I’m writing here to try and convince you that you can learn Go and have fun playing it in a very short timeframe, as I have done myself. As is customary, I’ll start with the basics of what Go is and where it came from. We call it Go in the west because that’s the Japanese name, and the game was first popularized among westerners by Japanese players. In China, where the game was invented, it’s called Weiqi (pronou...