I took up go rather late in life (I was about 30) and since discovering it, I have more or less stopped playing chess. If you're a chessplayer who is feeling stuck or wants to try something new, I would recommend it very highly. Chess is certainly a great game, but I've presented here a quick laundry list of complaints I had about the chess world that are not problems in go:

White advantage

If you don't like being forced to start the game where one side is always at a disadvantage, in go this is not a problem. A go game is won by the player with more points, and while the first player starts with the initiative, the second player is traditionally awarded a compensation, called “komi,” in the 5 to 8 point range, so that neither player is clearly more likely to win the game than the other. Go players rarely have a strong preference for color.

Draws

High level chess is full of “GM draws” without fighting; it is a common and constant complaint that well-played chess games tend strongly towards equality. In go an undecisive game is practically nonexistent. Komi includes a half-point to make it impossible for a completed game. There is the remote possibility of a kind of “threefold repetition of position”, a triple ko, but this is really a pathological situation, probably not even one in a million.

Too many Openings

In chess there is a massive amount of opening theory; keeping up in detail with the developments in your favorite special opening can be a huge practical advantage. In go, while there are some standard corner sequences, they relate to the whole board, so one can't specialize in just a few without incurring a global disadvantage. The requirements of preparation are relatively minimal, as it is fairly easy to avoid someone's pet variation or prepared analysis.

Too powerful computers

I found it disheartening that the truth of most chess positions can be found by giving the position to a competent analysis engine and letting it run for a few minutes. Go is not analyzable like this because of the sheer size of the search space. Computers are indeed getting somewhat stronger, and they may someday outperform humans in this field as well, but the AI challenge is very significant, and the appealing mystery of the game should remain intact for the foreseeable future.

Not enough scale and variety

I found after years of tournament play and study that many chess games fall into certain standard types of positions; I also found that a number of games that I played turned out pretty similar to one another. I can't think of one go game I've played that resembled any other, because it's like many smaller chess games going on at once, and relating to each other.

Boring passive opponents

A chess player who yields to every challenge but does not create weaknesses can often be impossible to beat, especially with the White pieces. A tough fortress sometimes just can't be cracked, even it's a much weaker player. This can be frustrating in a must-win situation in a tournament. In go, this isn't an issue at all; the person who yields to every challenge is really easy to beat in anything except a high handicap game. It's the players who fight with you that give trouble, but this is a much more interesting problem.

Poor pairing systems

The way the USCF runs Swiss system tournaments may be OK in some respects for determining a winner but it's no way to produce interesting or valuable games. I played in many chess tournaments next to people my own strength; I saw them all the time but never would be paired against them, but I'd play frequently against the same much weaker opponent. Go tournaments use a “Swiss-McMahon” system that begins every tournament with you playing an equally matched opponent. You move up or down from there based on your results.

Unequal opponents

In chess it isn't much fun playing against a much weaker opponent, feeling that anything other than a win would be a disaster and an embarrassment, while the win will prove nothing and teach you nothing about the game. It's also not much fun playing a much stronger opponent feeling there's not much chance to win. In go, there's a handicap system that makes these kinds of mismatches fun and interesting, giving both sides reasonable chances to win. Chess has a history of odds games too, but for some reason they've fallen out of favor, and are never used in tournaments or rated games; in go, they are commonplace.

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