Just wanted to create a thread to share my chess learning journey as a Go player. If there are any others in the same shoes, please feel free to share too. For those who came to Go from chess, you are also welcome to share your comments and advice!
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Just a brief intro: I knew about chess and its rules since long time ago. I started watching more chess online ever since I saw Magnus VS Fabiano in the World Chess Championship. The actual learning to play only started a few months ago when Duolingo started to provide chess lessons.
Since then, I’ve been learning and playing casually on both Duolingo and chess.com. Currently 900 ELO on Duolingo and 500 ELO on chess.com. Lets see how far I can go!
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one addiction is enough—– two addictions— are just well—– just self punishment– please reconsider your choice to take up chess while studying go two master are hard to server – i know iam addicted to both and play poorlyboth
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Well you are addicted. I’m not.
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we all say that —who play this game
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Hello @Sadaharu I came to GO from chess, which I picked up during the pandemic. The best analogy I have for the difference is that Chess is a battle between two kings where you try to destroy each others army whereas GO is like to empires strategically expanding their influence and control. as hobbies I think they are complimentary. Chess Tactics can be really fun and rewarding. I suggest you spend alot of time doing puzzles and playing game of at least ten minutes or more. ( stay away from bullet for now)
I find GO to be more relaxing and liberating, in Chess there are many forcing lines where is you don’t play with 100% precision you fall into a trap. Again tactically very rich. But in GO im really enjoying the Emergence of form and territory, its far more complex than chess. Enjoy the journey. 500 ELO chess is alot of fun because its not overladen with opening theory!
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Yes I’m avoiding blitz for now and sticking to 10 min, though I often run out of time when I’m winning. 
I don’t really bother about opening for now too since I’m bad at memorising joseki anyway 
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This is an oversimplification but for years I played chess. I was too insisting to play with self enthusiasm and play creative strategies. But for a thousand time at least I was beaten by some quick opening gambits (threats and traps let’s say) without even achieving a good mid-game fight. Maybe it is not the chess that feels in my mind. “To beat” actually is the ultimate objective. It is not how creative, how fast or how tricky you are playing. Then I realised I was looking for something else. I found that it is the joy of different alternatives, a broader gameplay, which I see in go.
I don’t mean that chess is not open to new and creative ideas. But i find it hard to surpass the opening traps, especially during the opening. For this reason I suppose the great Bobby Fischer came up with the idea of Fischer Chess, which is not very popular. This breaks the strict opening strategies and transverts the whole chess into a different reality: All the pieces’ location are randomized in the beginning of the game (except pawns) for white and black in a symmetric fashion. I wish that had been the accepted version of a chess game today.
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Freestyle chess is picking up thanks to Magnus Carlson and they even have a World Championship for it now
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Best of luck in the journey.
You can try playing with increment I guess if you struggle with time control a lot.
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I haven’t found an increment that I’m comfortable with. Also, one thing I will probably never get used to in chess is that there’s no countdown!
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IIRC in many websites you can set for some sort of buzz to go off when there’s a certain remaining time left, but not countdown.
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I have played a lot of chess when I was younger. Growing up we couldn’t afford many games, so we had a pocket/travel magnetic chess board at home and I used to play at least one game per day against my older brother. None of us could really play (we just knew the rules and had studied nothing else on it) but just on the merit of being older my brother won all the time, for many years in a row.
Chess and a couple of thousand consecutive losses at it, taught me a lot about fun and perseverance.
Later in life chess brought some amusing moments where in university and in the army people who claimed to “have studied the game” lost games to me who genuingly didn’t know even the most typical of openings. If you play for fun, it comes in unexpected ways hehe.
The game’s flaws shine past a certain level though… when I played a couple of games against someone that had actually studied the game and had an actual rank in real life competitions (there were no online competitions yet, anyway, so those where the only way to get a ranking), he just used some of the most basic memorised openings against me, I didn’t know the preset answers and inevitably always stumbled into an “incorrect branch of moves” that led to my defeat.
That is when I realised that past a certain level chess is no longer a strategy game, but it is mostly a puzzle game. If you know the solution to the puzzle, you win. If not, you lose.
I haven’t played chess in a long time, but I still have fun playing it on an low amateur level, where two people that have no clue about openings can challenge their minds to find a strategic edge on the board.
Against ranked people that “know openings” I think that it is boring for them (it is just like running a heurestic algorithm to remember the “correct path to victory”) and it is pointless for me because it reduces me to just a “pantomime player”.
On the other hand Go allows for a wider array of strategy and mistakes, thus requires a far lower threshold of study, in order to enter the “path to improvement”.
I read Janice Kim’s five “Learn to Play Go” books a couple of times and off I went to DGS and declared myself 12k. And so I was and I started improving from there, mostly by playing correspondence games and thinking about each move. And here I am now at an ELO that would amount to a “Class A” player in chess.
Chess, as far as I can tell is not like that and in order to reach “class A”, the improvement there comes mostly by memorising and hard/serious study and reviewing. Those are not qualities that I am good at, so I left chess on the level where it is still fun for me.
If you would like we could play a game sometime. What platform do you play on?
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Sure. chess.com would probably work. Sadaharu was already taken so my ID is Sadaharu2624 there.
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Sounds good! I’ll make a profile there over the weekend and send you a message.
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I used to play chess before Go until I noticed there was a Go community (small but here I am) in my country. I loved (and love) chess, but I abandoned in favor of Go. For me, Go is a more creative game. But this is not about comparisons just I just enjoy more spending my time with Go than with chess, and whenever I think about playing a game of chess, when I open it I say to myself, why not a game of Go?
There is only one thing I miss about chess, the possibility to play a game under 10min. When I played chess I played all the time, at computer, mobile… With Go, if I’m not in front of my computer I don’t play. Maybe I have to change that.
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It’s what I mostly play when I hop onto lichess for a game. I don’t much play chess, just treat it as something that’s easy to get a quick game in with due to the large playerbase, for the record
I think chess960 is a good direction for chess to go in in terms of a least-change improvement to the game, so I’m happy to support, if only by occasionally contributing to a healthy playerpool looking for live games, its adoption. Not the variant I would’ve chosen to improve chess, but in this case, I’m happy to go with the only thing better than perfect is standard and support the one that has some momentum behind it
There’s a chrome extension that adds an audio countdown to lichess, iirc. I hate that audio countdown isn’t standard outside of Go and Shogi
Yeah, it’s a poor substitute, at best
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I’d have to disagree that chess isn’t strategic after you surpass a certain level again. After say 2000 ELO when players know the opening theory we’ll enough to survive it then it’s purely strategic from there. I’d think of it as a layer cake. Where the mix of tactical bs strategical varies as you go up the ranks.
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After playing chess thus far, I can sort of understand why many people prefer chess to Go. Chess is able to give you the “thrill” much better than Go does.
Taking pieces is part of the game mechanics of chess. It feels very “good” to keep taking pieces from your opponent until you eventually end up in checkmate. However, in Go, taking stones is only a byproduct of the game rules and it’s never the goal of the game. The objective is to get more territory than your opponent, not take more stones than your opponent. Many beginners end up focusing too much on taking the stones and forgetting about surrounding the territory. Even if the players focus on surrounding the territory, it is a long, “boring” process especially on big boards. To add on, after they finish, many players will come to reddit to ask who is winning for OTB games.
The “thrill” in Go is even less for close games that end up in a 0.5 result. It is akin to a game of soccer that end up in 0-0 even after overtime and have to be settled via PK.
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I’d say in many beginner games at chess, players end up making 1 or 2 move threats that does not help with position, even make it worse if the opponent responds well.
But yeah, taking enemy pieces feels good, even when you are more advanced xd.
I think the go equivalent of it is end up capturing a big enemy group, kill a corner, etc.
Also like… in chess winning the strategical battle is also more “rewarded”. Either you see the enemy position dissolving, or may end up with a tactical win. (Sometimes it can look really beautiful). But similar situation in go may end up with just you surrounding the groups, groups living barely and you ending up winning by a huge amount of points, which may feel “less rewarding”, compared to actually killing enemy groups.
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