Is Chess better than Go? Debate.

Can you guys come up with 3 reasons either way?

ugys

What? Don't understand.

I like debate less than rebate.

There are no objective 'reasons'. Unless by 'better' you mean 'for the greater good for humanity' (or even the planet as a whole) but I think it should be fairly clear that neither game significantly affects matters at that level. 

Chess is more exciting 

Thanks! I think I have enough for my 6th grade English essay. You guys are awesome.

You're comparing an apple to an orange. The two are very different, played for very different reasons.

go is easier to spell than chess. & since they count words but not letters in an essay, just go with go,

Oranges and apples are both fruits. You should say something like "You're comparing baguettes to avocados". 

but they're both edible.

Touche

And both Go and Chess are abstract strategy board games, just like apple and oranges are both fruits.

You have to be more accurate in chess, and to win you have to outplay your opponent by a larger margin. I think you could argue these points either way (chess is better or chess is worse). Comes down to personal preference I suppose.

I have a few reasons, that could be argued:

(1) In Go, masters can still beat computers! Chess has more possible games than atoms in the universe, but Go has even exponentially more, so many that even computers can't handle them well, and a master's strategic intuition often is much better. Yeah, some computers have been able to beat masters, but it's comparable to the rate that top GMs these days can beat computers like Stockfish! 

(2) Go is not in danger of being "solved", because it has so many possibilities! But this doesn't matter to everyone who isn't like a 2750+ GM haha, where you can pretty much force draws in certain positions.

(3) Go not only has its own variants, including special stones / special rules, but you can change the size of the board if you want, which is really cool for changing games. Chess, on the other hand, although there are variants, is generally the same.

I still like chess better than Go, for many many reasons tho

This is no longer true.  It used to be thought that as strategy matters more in Go than in Chess, and tactics matter less, that humans would retain the advantage.  But last year the AlphaGo program defeated the 9-dan professional Lee Sedol. He is ranked in the world's top ten. That is the Go equivalent of a 2760+ GM (although Elo ratings in Go go higher than chess ratings, into the 3000s)

What we think of as superior or inferior depends on our values and there is no universally agreed set of values.  If there were we would not have had millennia of religious and idealogical conflicts.

The simpler basic rules of Go are often quoted as one of its advantages over chess, but they have disadvantages too.  One is that you have to be quite strong to know when the game is over and to get the score right if it has been a close game.  There is no such problem in chess where checkmate is unarguable and the conditions for a draw are also precise (stalemate, 3-fold repetition, 50-move rule).

Another "advantage" of Go is said to be the freedom from artificial rules like castling, the double first move of the pawn, and en passant that have no connection with the underlying logic. But Go has its own artificiality in the rule of Ko, which is necessary to prevent endless repetition of a position.

A feature of Go is that is that the stronger player beats the weaker player more surely than in chess.  There is little scope for an upset.  What is more a smaller difference in strength is needed to establish such superiority. Whether you think that is an advantage or a disadvantage is a matter of opinion.

There are two aspects of Go that I think are definitely improvements on chess. The use of "komi" (a few points start for the player that goes second) eliminates the advantage of the first move, and the handicapping system allows players of up to 9-stones difference in strength to play a game that is challenging to both without distorting the nature of the game to the huge extent that handicaps distort a game of chess.

C H O'Donnel Alexander once made the point that if an alien civilisation has a chess-like game it will be different in all its details but if they have a game like GO it might well be identical. That might be true, but it does not make the game "superior" in any absolute sense. 

One good thing about go I can mention though is that it's a lot easier for weaker players to play much better players... i.e. in chess there is no good handicap system.