which is a better game?
You might want to cool it with all these “which is better” topics
Which is better? Why not play both together?
I think a better question would be what makes them different?
I´d say Chess is the more tactical game and less positional; perhaps 80:20.
Go is much more positional, 50:50. It´s not like a battle, where you try to decapitate the opposing King. More a 300 year fight between 2 civilizations trying to settle a new continent.
Go feels so very detached. That´s what I like best about it.
Chess is better.
Why else would this topic come up again and again on a Go-forum?
Here we go again…
Good point. How often do the chess forums talk about Go?
Not even going to include a poll?
Also
Go is better, because the name is shorter.
Remind me of that time when a Go dev join OGS chat for 2 whole days before realizing this is not a programming forum
They should have stuck around. We don’t talk about programming on here almost as much as we don’t talk about Go
Go is better, because Black goes first.
Better is a difficult word, but I remember an image of two toddlers comparing which swimming pool is better because this one is 5m deep and this one is 15m deep.
I’ll say it again though: I wish we had problems as good as some chess problems / studies, where it sometimes feel that you are playing a completely different game.
yeah, I find it so weird that some Gomoku derivatives have White moving first. It’s like they’re just being contrarian for the sake of it
we do? tsumego? igo hatsuron (or however you spell it) 120?
Example:
Does go have anything as different as that? I think it’s hard since it’s missing the kind of global invariants that chess has, like bishops stay on one color, pawns only change file by capturing, etc.
This kind of problem (retrograde analysis) is definitely a good example, but even in standard chess composition (as in, trying to win the game), the variety is astounding. Even simple endgame positions have some crazy things like the Saavedra position (Saavedra position - Wikipedia) that forces you to think very differently from actual games. I rarely see such completely out-of-the-box problems in go; a few examples in symmetric problems, the temple problem, hidden sekis. Sure, the crazy shichos in Igo Hastuyoron are fun, but this is not quite the same thing.
Rambling rook-type problems. A player’s king is blocked and the best play is to sacrifice his pieces so that he has a stalemate. In order to win, the opponent has to reject the sacrifices to manage to unblock his opponent’s king to get a winning position. The rook is litterally running after the king begging to be taken.
Humor chess compositions, like a problem where the fastest mate makes you bring your pieces back to the initial position. Another problem I remember (can’t find it right now) where black has four possible pieces to move, but white can answer with the queen to force the piece to come back to the initial position, and eventually mates in three; the title is something like “shepherd dog” or “mom watching her children”. In both case the point is that you can only get the joke if you solve the problem.
Composition chalenges: just as an example, Babson task - Wikipedia. Create a position where the opponent has four possible promotions and your best answer is always to promote to the same piece. You cannot make this up. Just looking at the bottom of this page right now, there are some tasks that noone managed to make into an actual position for 50 years+ and the first example was found last month.