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 (pronounced Way-Chi), and in Korea it’s called Baduk. The rules of the game are famously simple, the two opposing players take turns placing stones on the intersections of a 19x19 board and attempt to surround more empty points of space than their opponent. If a group of your stones is fully surrounded by your opponent, then those stones are captured, removed from the board, and placed in your territory during scoring (thus subtracting from your final score). The game ends and goes into scoring when both players decide that there are no productive moves left to be played and pass their turn. Despite the simplicity of the rules, the game took longer for AI to crack than Chess given the massive board size (361 points vs 64 chess squares) and the ambiguity of the goal (surrounding territory vs checkmating the king).

Chess is a game that is commonly compared to Go, and there are very good reasons for that, but I think that comparing/contrasting the two games will help illuminate the appeal of Go. I also have a lot of experience with Chess (peak chess.com rapid rating of 1800 (that’s pretty good if you don’t play)) so it’s easy for me to talk about knowledgeably, and I can confidently say at this point that I like Go more than Chess. 

To start with similarities, both games have centuries of history and cultural significance, and are seen as “refined” games in their respective cultures. It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t have any respect at all for either game. They are also games that are played on grids with black & white pieces that can capture each other. The more experienced player will rarely lose to a less experienced one.

The differences are what's interesting though. One of the fundamental differences I like to point to is that while Chess starts with a set board that slowly empties, Go starts with a blank board that is slowly filled. This makes the opening stage of a Go game much less rigid than that of Chess. The initial setup of a chessboard inherently directs the player to certain targets: the F pawn is always weak, the knights always influence the same spots, the bishops always start on certain diagonals, etc. This has led to Chess openings being exhaustively researched, and you can be hit with pre-prepared traps that prevent you from leaving the opening alive. Bobby Fischer, one of the all-time greats of the game, famously disliked the opening prep aspect of Chess and proposed a Chess variant that randomizes the arrangement of the back rank of pieces, removing the possibility of opening prep. 

Go has no need for such variants, as you are able to make interesting decisions right from the beginning of the game. There are certainly guidelines for the opening, and even rigid move sequences called joseki, but the horizon of possibilities is much wider than in Chess. While Chess openings usually emphasize control of the center, in Go the players typically begin by controlling the corners. This is because the corner is the easiest place to create a living (that is, uncapturable) group of stones that you can expand from. Thus each individual corner is kind of like a mini chess opening, where you will probably play a prepared joseki, but your choice of joseki is going to depend on the state of the rest of the board. You can decide whether you want the corner for yourself or you can purposefully give it up to take the outside influence on the rest of the board. You can try and get two of your corner walls to face each other and create a huge potential territory (moyo) along the side of the board. So although set patterns in the opening exist, the board as a whole is your own creation, and you don’t need to wait to leave the opening to get there as in Chess.

A minor additional point is that it’s harder to play “lame” in Go as it is in Chess as far as I can tell. There are infamously defensive openings in Chess that are hard to crack and commonly lead to draws, such as the London System and the Hedgehog and Hippopotamus defenses. You cannot afford to curl up into a ball in Go because then your opponent will simply take the rest of the board, making aggressive expansion is the only viable strategy. Similarly, if your opponent approaches your group of stones, it’s very often necessary to respond immediately. If you don’t, it often happens that your stones become outnumbered and endangered. Thus responding to your opponent is encouraged at all times, and choosing to step away from a fight is actually a bold statement (“I don’t feel threatened by you in this area anymore”) rather than a cowardly flight.

Another interesting point to compare with Chess is the nature of imbalances. Jeremy Silman popularized the concept of imbalances for Chess, which is defined as the differing advantages/disadvantages that each player has in the game. Some of these are center control, pawn structure, amount of space, each player’s bishop/knight composition, initiative, and material. All of these imbalances matter a lot at higher levels, but at lower levels most games are decided by imbalances of initiative and material. Even at my decent level, most games end due to a tactical oversight that leads to an insurmountable loss of material. High level players are able to do cool ass things like purposefully sacrifice material for a preferable imbalance in another category, but you need an insane amount of knowledge to pull such a thing off.

In comparison, Go players have access to more imbalances at a lower level than Chess players. Of course, my games are still most often decided by a tactical failure in a local fight, but I am also regularly sacrificing stones for territorial gains already. Because the value of a stone versus the value of territory is clearly defined by the scoring system, it’s very obvious whether or not a stone/group is worth saving or not. If you can just take one step further, you can place a stone in a key location knowing that it will eventually be captured, but use it to take territory elsewhere that exceeds its value.

One final difference I want to point out between the games is the general fluidity of Go. Chess is very rigid and systematic, with fairly clear lines between opening, middle, and endgame. The lines are much blurrier in Go, as since each player is trying to maximize the point value of each move, playing locally can initially be necessary to save territory but becomes less valuable as the fight gets settled. This means that near-endgame states are reached locally very early on, but are only finished up later when all the more valuable points are taken. Thus after the opening, the game is constantly hopping between middle and endgame until there is no middle left. This makes the game feel more dynamic than the strictly disciplined game of Chess.

Hopefully if you have experience with Chess then you can see whether Go appeals to your tastes or not. If it does, please reach out to me because I’d love to have more friends that I can talk to about the game, and I’m glad to be a teacher. If you feel like you want to take a stab at the game at your own pace, I’m linking some resources below that helped me out greatly in my Go journey:

GoMagic is the website that I’ve learned the most from. It has lectures and problems to solve, and is accessible, clear, and initially free. If you like the content, you can pay for a membership for more lessons, which I have done myself and have found helpful.

OGS is the main site I’ve used for online matchmaking. You can usually find a game pretty quick here and I haven’t felt the need to join any other servers quite yet.

Kisedo Publishing is a major publisher of English-language Go books.

This Reddit Post contains links to other resources if you don’t like these ones.

Get Playing!