I agree, but maybe I should make it clearer that I am not talking about doing that. What I am talking about is the distance between the highest and lowest ratings players actually achieve. And that is meaningful.

Consider Tic-Tac-Toe: there's basically three classes of players: 1) those who play badly, 2) those who play sensibly, but didn't quite internalize the trick, 3) those who never lose to anyone. If you did ELO ratings for Tic-Tac-Toe players, the gap between someone in 3 and someone in 1 would be relatively small. Less than 1000 points, I would guess. So there's a real sense in which the skill range in Chess is bigger than Tic-Tac-Toe (stay tuned for other novel claims ). This is true whether you call the worst Tic-Tac-Toe player 0, 1000 or -1000.[1]

You can do the same comparison with Chess and Go. When I mentioned that Fan Hui was 2800, my point isn't "is that less or more than Magnus Carlsen?" It's that in Go, Fan Hui's 2800 is on a scale that includes players all the way down to 100, and Chess only goes down to 1000.[2] The range of skills in Go is somewhat broader than in Chess.

This is also a weak comparison. As others point out, it's heavily dependent on who acquires ratings, and it seems clear that in the US and Europe, Go players are much more likely to get rated when they are beginners than Chess players are.

[1] This somewhat understates how much deeper Chess is than Tic-Tac-Toe.
[2] I'm not going to be precise about this. There are actual Chess players below 1000 ELO, they just don't have ratings. There are actual Go players below 100 ELO, they just don't have ELO ratings in Europe (but there are established 30 kyu players in the US!).

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Board size matters. My guess is that the range of skill at "Western" chess is broader than the range of skill at 9x9 go. And there was a form of shogi played on a 25x25 board! How broad was the range of skill for that game!

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It makes sense to try comparisons between rated go players versus rated chess players. Certainly there are a lot of chess players who, if they were rated, would have ratings below 1000. Similarly there must be go players who, if rated, would have ratings below 100. On the other end, there are many go players who are not rated but if they did get a rating it would be dan level. I base this on the number of apparent USA online players with strong playing levels but who are not rated by the AGA. And there are quite a few strong go players in the USA who are immigrants from Korea or China but who do not participate in rated tournaments. It would of course affect the histogram of player strengths if it were possible to include all these players. Of course that is not possible in practice, hence my statement that comparisons should be made based on populations of rated players.

If you remove the bottom 14% of go players, you should also remove the bottom 14% of chess players, IMO, to get a fair comparison. The EGF system has an artificial bottom, most of those rating 100 players are somewhere between 20k and 35k, and should have negative ratings.

Yes, but the bottom chessplayers(even more than 14%) are already removed by looking at fide rating as
1. there is a minimal Elo(I think it is now 1000, but not so long ago it was quite a bit higher), if your first tournament is weeker than that, you dont get one.
2. Many tournaments for players at weeker levels are only rated in national rating, so most week players dont have an Elo(despite having played in tournaments), while almost all strong players do

That was one of my concerns. I wasn't sure how those players with rating 100 came to be in the database; my intuition (based on the exact 100 rating) was that these players were registered but did not play a single game and therefore their rating couldn't be trusted. If this was the case, then removing them removes noise; but I don't think that is an unbiased removal, because even if that assumption is correct, they are likely to have below average rating so they shouldn't simply be removed, but rather accounted for somehow..

Regarding the rest of the discussion, I don't know if FIDE and EGF reach a similar set of players.
I don't play chess, so I don't know of many chess online servers. Some of them might have this data public or obtainable through an API - I wouldn't mind comparing it with OGS or some other Go server.

They are players who play games but whose rating would be at 100 or below based in those games. You can see that a few of them have a recent negative change in rating: they were briefly above 100 but dropped below that line. You can search players on the EGD website if you want to verify this.

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If 100 is the EGF lowest possible rating, then they shouldn't be removed.

Here is the new plot:


Note that the comparison changed now:

10k ~ 1855 FIDE (from ~1800)
1d ~ 2190 FIDE (between top expert and candidate master)
FIDE Master (2300) ~ EGF 2376 (strong 3d)
FIDE GrandMaster (2500) ~ EGF 2780 (strong 7d)

As long as you are clear about the difficulty of drawing any further conclusions from the result, it's fine, I guess.

Myself, I actually prefer a more "squishy" estimate, because I don't think the comparison you're giving tells us what I want to know. What I find myself curious about from time to time is "what level could almost any player expect to reach in this game, given several years and a moderate amount of effort?" These questions are open to bias, as evidenced by the people who pop up and tell new players "Anyone can make 1 dan, and you shouldn't expect it to be hard!" I have my own take for Go, but don't know what the equivalent is for chess.

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My chess rating is ELO 2260, and I just started to play go, but because of Corona only against the Program "Many Faces of Go". Here I manage to win against 12 kyu, but (despite I do a lot of study) I know the rules only since 4 weeks. So the 12 kyu of that program cannot be realistic.
A good measure of playing strength is the frequency of errors. In Go there is now this AI Sensej software, which shows how many mistakes you make. In chess there is also such a software (Chessbase - Fritz), but not so clearly arranged for that purpose.
In chess, however, the following can be said: Up to Elo 1200, games are usually decided exclusively by big tactical errors. Until Elo 1500 it is almost the same. Only from Elo 1700 upwards you will meet players who have really dealt with the theory, and also train a bit every now and then. Most of the time, however, they play on instinct, and do little concete calculation (in chess they talk about calculation, in go they talk about reading)
Elo 2000 and higher, people usually have theory knowledge and calculate variantions, but the whole thing is still quite inaccurate and not very concrete. From Elo 2200 on, you can only win if you really overplay your opponent and make as few mistakes as possible.
The German Chess Bundesliga, for example, actually only starts between Elo 2350 and Elo 2400, with the top teams consisting of foreign professionals with 2600, 2700 and more.
So if the best German Go players have 6 Dan, that should be a grandmaster strength in chess (at least Elo 2500). In this respect I can't really imagine that e.g. 1 Dan doesn't also mean at least Elo 2000 in chess.
And its a big difference between organized chessplayers and the internet. Here is a list about clubplayers and stregth in germany
< 1000 - beginner (altough there are club players since 30 Years with that rating)
1000 - 1300 intermediate
1300 - 1600 normal Clubplayer
1600 - 1900 strong Clubplayer
1900 - 2100 outstanding Clubplayer
2100 - 2300 Candidate Master
2300 - 2400 Master
2400 - 2500 International Master
2500 - Grandmaster
2750 World Elite
2850 Magnus Carlsen

How about such a List for Go??

I while ago, I made a table near the end of this page.

According to that table (assuming USCF ratings rather than FIDE ratings):
- Your 2260 chess Elo rating may be equivalent to a go rank of about 4-5d EGF (or about 6d AGA).
- A chess Elo rating of 2000 may be equivalent to a go rank of about 2d EGF (or about 4d AGA).
- Your 12k go rank may be equivalent to a chess Elo rating of about 1200.

Note that EGF ratings are not really Elo ratings.

My USCF chess rating is just over 2000, which I have always considered to be basically the equivalent of the 1d threshold in Go. In both cases I think that that's the point where you've acquired basic competency in the fundamentals of the game, both conceptually and in execution.

Since more than 75% of the club chess players never reach a value of 2000 in their lives, I find it a bit harsch to talk about basic competences
But if you have reached 1 dan in Go, and 2000 Elo or USCF in chess, then you must be able to judge this better than I can.

Yes, I think I've mentioned elsewhere that I use "competent" as a real compliment, and not as just the opposite of "incompetent". I basically mean that you have a fairly complete understanding of the game across the board with no gaping holes, and progression from this point forward is more a question of getting better rather than of getting less bad. I don't like calling this level "mastery" because I certainly don't feel like I've mastered chess!

(And I should mention that I do not consider myself particularly close to 1d in Go; Fox ranks are very soft. But it is nice being able to put that d in my profile info!)

But there seems to be a gap between professionals and amateurs at Go, which is much wider than in chess. A few days ago I read in the German Go magazine that a single game victory of the European champion against the world no. 66 from China in a tournament not long ago was the biggest success for European Go since a long time. If you look at the Chess Rating list (https://2700chess.com/?per-page=100), you will find Matthew Sadler ranked at 40. Matthew works for Hewlett Packard and the is an Amateur.
LeeSedol also spoke of the playing strength of the former European Champion Fan Hui 2d also very derogatory.
In chess, however, there was not even a professional system in the former Soviet Union, as it seems to exist in South Korea, China and Japan. Maybe money is the reason here, because in chess there are maybe 50 players in the world who can really make a good living from it.

The European go champion is not an amateur, he is a pro (Ilya Shihksin 3p from russia. 3p may be borderline GM in chess).

There are several amateurs in Europe of that level (all coming from the Far East, sort of "failed pros") and probably a lot more in the Far East. They are not offically pro, but some of them make a living from go.
The lower ranked pros probably have a hard time making a living from go.

I you count the number of go players who make a good living from go, you will probably also find less than 100 players worldwide.

I think that the actual gap in skill is less than has often been thought, especially in modern times with online play and AI. There has traditionally been a mystical gap between "amateur thinking" and "pro thinking", but these days I think it's pretty well accepted that the line is fuzzy, with the strongest amateurs being clearly of pro strength.

Only top level pros can make good living from prize money alone. Players who are top 10 for a decade or more can even become rich.

Lower pros probably depend on other things for their living, like providing administrative services to the pro association, teaching amateurs and kids, writing books, presenting go TV shows, etcetera.

The line between pros and amateurs has always been fuzzy. Even 200 years ago their were amateurs who could compete with pros. The only reason they were amateurs is that they had other duties (like being some kind of feudal lord), so their profession was not a matter of choice.

"making a living" has less to do with competency, and more with the amount of money that is dedicaced to the discipline.

In some disciplines, the world champion isn't a full time pro, because there's no money, while in other, you have over 60.000 professional players