Go Players Who Also Play Chess

   

Chess and Go have a lot in common, as evidenced by Compare Go To Chess and similar discussions which tend to pop up from time to time among (at least western) Go players. [1]

This page is not meant to be a replay of that discussion. What i would like this page to be is a place for those who actually enjoy both chess and Go (I almost always see Go capitalized, whether or not it begins a sentence, is this the correct way?) to be able to discuss the two games and how they tend to relate.

I know for myself, I learned to play chess at a young age, and for the most part never really took much of an interest in it. This, I think, was mostly due to the fact that I felt I was horrible at the game and never really got enough of an insight into it to either improve or see the beauty of it. I would play from time to time, but never went out of my way for a game.

It wasn't until many years later that I discovered Go, and for some reason it clicked for me immediately. I loved it - despite the fact that I was, of course, horrible at the game.

After some time playing and learning Go, I had the opportunity to play a game of chess. To my surprise, chess had become a much more interesting game to me. Not only was I better at it since taking up Go, but I actually was able to appreciate more of the beauty of the game. Since that time I have become a much more enthusiastic player of chess, and I definitely feel that my Go playing helps my chess game. I don't think I can say the reverse at this point, but that is probably because Go is the game that I play and study more.

So, tell me I'm not alone in this - are you a chess player who has taken up Go, or a Go player trying out chess? What's your story with the two games?

--RussellKhan


Tamsin: I was a chess player till I found go. I still enjoy playing casual games and fast games on FICS, but I don't think I could ever take chess seriously again. There's too much book-learning of openings to be done, and I find it hard enough maintaining a suitable repertoire of basic joseki. Also, the go scene is more female-friendly, though it is good to see women at chess tournaments more often these days, too.


IanDavis I still am a chess player who much prefers Go. Trouble is no Go club around here! I find Go a much more peaceful game, with more capacity to teach and interact with weaker players. Initially some GO players made derogatory remarks about chess which put me off learning.


Duncan: I very much agree with the above comments. It is a LOT easier to find chess opponents than Go players, even taking into account the fact that they have to be close to your level in order to make the game interesting. That's the real problem with Go - nobody plays it. However, although I've been playing chess for years, and only started Go a couple of months ago, I do think I'm starting to prefer Go.

I think the two games have much in common. Both are tactical and strategic games that suit a logical mind very well. I think players of the one are thus naturally more likely to be good at the other, and to enjoy both.

The real difference is that Go is more strategic, and chess more tactical. As such, I think chess is a game that really suits logically minded people with the abilitly to calculate many moves in advance. Of course, this is also an important skill in Go, but as important is pattern recognition and a whole board view, so it is a game more suited to a flexible or 'soft' style of play.

The two do compliment each other very well, though, and both are very enjoyable, just in different ways.


Bill: Shusai Honinbo was a strong amateur at shogi (Japanese chess). 5-dan, I think. Apparently it is not uncommon for a Japanese go pro to be a strong amateur at shogi, and vice versa.

Tom: I thought it was Kitani. I can't swear to it until I check my book, but the temptation to correct Bill was too strong for me -- I might never get another chance.


ilanpi: I started playing chess seriously 30 years ago and am now enjoying comparing my progress in go with that of chess with all those years of development and deterioration separating the two. So far, the progress has been about the same, and the stronger I get at go, the more I find the two games similar.

There are some things in chess that I miss in go:

  • No good go computer programs. I enjoyed playing computers a lot, because it forced me to be honest, that is, to forget about weak moves that would trap a human player, and also to prevent sloppiness. Also, on chess servers, they were often the only players to accept my challenge. The closest thing in go is automated Life and Death problems (which likewise helped my game a lot).
  • No blitz games for money (not in my experience anyway). Many years of doing this in chess made my game a lot tougher (as well as earning some money). The go equivalent is described in the novel First Kyu with a similar conclusion.
  • Non handicap go tournaments are essentially "class tournaments", that is, you will only play people very close to your rating. In chess, I always avoided this, and enjoyed playing games with players of different strengths. Moreover, the Swiss system allowed you to ease into a tournament by giving you weaker opponents in the first rounds (once you were high enough rated). Conversely, as a weaker player, you get to play very strong players in the first rounds.

LukeNine45: I was a pretty big chess person before I started playing go. Go (on a full-sized board) seems a lot broader in scope than chess. Surprisingly (at least to me) now when I play chess, I find that I put to work a lot of the whole-board thinking that Go taught me, and I think it helped my game noticably.

In chess, though, often the whole game is decided by one tactic. If I get a pawn up, I feel like the rest of the game should be easy... In go, you can loose two groups and still cream the other guy strategically (at least if you're both inconsistent kyu players like me).

It's a lot easier to find chess players, but it's very difficult to have anything close to an even game if they're not around your level.


yoyoma: I don't think that chess and Go differ dramatically on the joseki vs openings front. You can become a very strong player in both without studying them much, instead relying on a very few joseki or openings. Or you can expand your arsenal to include more variations. gobase has a [ext] repertoire of 25 joseki for beginners.

BTW has anyone done a statistical analysis to match Go and chess ratings? Like take the bell curves of Go player and chess player strengths and see where things match. I've always used 1d = 2000 as my rough guess.

ilanpi: I know of very few players much above 2200 who didn't know lots of opening theory. I would be interested in your specific examples of "very strong" chess players who haven't studied openings much.

yoyoma: And I know very few players above 3d who haven't studied openings much. But its possible, and there are some, although very few like you say.

ilanpi: Here is an example of what type of opening preparation is required in chess: When I was 2277 US (in fact stronger) I played a 2065 rated player and thought it would be easy (I had lost a good game against a grandmaster in the previous round) and the opening went like this (I was White):

1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 c5 5. cxd Qb6

OK, I had never seen that move before, and I figured out a variation where I won a pawn, but I didn't see that he ended up winning it back leading to a dead drawn endgame. In the analysis, he started quoting games played against him by various grandmasters in which he played this move, and the subsequent results. So, a relatively weak player who only knew this one gambit which he used against unsuspecting opponents during the US Open. I discussed this with an International Master friend of mine who just said: "Yup, you gotta to know that. You can't play d4 without knowing every single one of those stupid variations." Obviously, the same goes for e4 openings. So, what's left, really...

Of course, there have been strong players who didn't know a lot of opening theory, but rather invented when they played. For example, Capablanca who refuted the Marshall counter gambit (one variation anyway) over the board, the first time it was every played, even though it was a prepared opening. The same is true of Emanuel Lasker who defeated the Reti opening the first time it was played (or was it the second). I suppose that something similar might hold true in go.

yoyoma: (There is a typo in your game there, I guess 3 or 4 is Nc6?) But I would say that the people I'm talking about that don't learn opening theory in chess don't play 2.c4! Instead they will play some stonewall or grand prix attack formation, like d4, e3, Nf3, Bd3, Nbd2... stuff along these lines. Its the same in Go, such as WaysToAvoidTheTaisha. People who don't want to learn the complex lines can take simpler ones.

ilanpi: Thanks for pointing out the mistake. I don't recall anyone over 2000 ever playing the stonewall. I guess "prodigies" like Seirewan and Fischer played the King's Indian Reversed until they got to 2200, but broadened their repertoire after that.

It is true that you can avoid the complicated openings in chess, which in fact is how I always played, but the point is that you need to know hundreds of such simplifying variations, e.g., the Black d3 move in the Smith-Morra, etc., etc. I suppose that what you are saying is that the same thing holds in go, but I know for a fact that in chess you need to know these things at a much earlier stage. People were playing the Smith-Morra gambit against me a few months after I started playing seriously, so when I less than 1400, and I needed to know what to do. In fact, being a youthful nerd at the time, I would count the number of openings I had memorized and got to a hundred fairly soon, like a month after I started studying chess. I don't think this old nerd knows much more than 20 joseki a year after starting to study go.


Charles I'd say that opening theory (being able to play any type of fuseki acceptably) comes into go training seriously at about the 3d/4d level; i.e. when you are already a good amateur player. Before that, you need a joseki repertoire, but not a very deep one; and just need some sensible ways to play in the opening to get a comfortable position.


Bill: One thing about joseki, by comparison with chess openings, is that, because joseki are local, it is often good to deviate from joseki. Memorizing joseki does not have such a big payoff in go.


Malweth: It's interesting... my grandfather and father both taught me chess, but I never really got very good at it (perhaps because I was always playing players that were too good for me -- my father won a number of small tournaments in school). My brother has actually gotten fairly good at chess (though I'm sure we're all somewhere between 500-1500). Lately, however, I tried playing some chess (littlegolem and chessmaster) and found that I'm actually quite a bit better at it now than I was before playing go! I don't study chess (openings, etc) so I still suck, but I can actually read some moves into the game. I haven't been successful getting my father and brother to learn go, but perhaps I can get them started on littlegolem (starting with chess, of course).


what: Some chess players come to understand that the confines of a chess board constitute one "castle". Two chess players battle to gain control of that castle. In go, it is more like two players drop stones on a field, build many castles out of them, and struggle against the opponent in all of them at the same time.


C.S. Graves: I've played chess for years now, go for only a few. I enjoy both games for different reasons. As someone noted on Compare Go To Chess, they each have strengths and weaknesses. Chess is subtractive, go additive. Chess is based on movement, go on shape. The aesthetic considerations are important to me as well. Generally I prefer the conceptual simplicity of go/baduk, with its uniform stones and uncheckered grid. I won't deny the more elaborate beauty of a nice wooden Staunton chess set though, each piece a little sculpture of its own. As per the rigidity in chess opening, this is a major consideration if you're out to win... but the reason I play either game is simply to have fun. Also, the formalized opening systems aren't so much an issue if one were to play Fischer's Randomized Chess. Chess variants on larger boards also exist for a more involved and deeper game, just as 13x13 and 9x9 baduk allow one a quick fix. Some prefer apples, some oranges, I prefer to have both.


norml: I have played chess for many many years, first learning it from my father when I was about 7 years old. It was through a friend at a chess club that I was persuaded to give Go more than a cursory attempt, and I'm thankful for that (you know who you are). I've only played Go for a short time but already find it far more satisfying than a game of chess. I still enjoy a game every now and then, mostly with my father, but given the choice I'll almost always log on to KGS or IGS rather than FICS.

I also think I progressed through the initial DDK ranks rather quickly, compared to many, and attribute that to my years of playing chess. Unfortunately, I've been stuck around the 9k level for almost 4 months now - perhaps I should attribute that to years of playing chess too...


zinger: I agree that having played chess helps when learning Go. Chess players have already trained their mind to the process of move selection: (1) check for immediate tactical threats (2) consider overall strategy (3) select candidates based on 1 and 2 (4) read a few moves from each candidate (5) evaluate result after each sequence (6) choose move. I also feel that in both games, step 5 is the biggest difference between decent players and strong players.


iopq: I was a club chess player probably around 1500 FIDE. After a month of playing Go, I'm totally crushing people who played a similar amount. I'm about 20 kyu on KGS and I am improving quickly. This is due to having played chess. I notice mistakes people do that I wouldn't do in chess - wasting a move on something that's already guaranteed to happen. For example, if you see a pawn hangs even if it's the opponent's turn, you can just do something else with that turn and get a bigger advantage. In Go, this translates as not having to move to kill a dead group. Also, knowing when to give up - if you don't give up fast enough you're wasting your time you could use to play more games.


Comparision of FIDE titles and EGF Go ratings.


[1] I (somewhat) jokingly tend to say that chess players don't much make similar comparisons because they just don't even know what Go is.


This is a copy of the living page "Go Players Who Also Play Chess" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2007 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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