Life In 19x19

Are we sure that people aren't misusing "snob" here? I always took a snob to be someone who thought that certain people were superior and inferior, with the particular connotation of inferior social status. Making value judgments about things (or perhaps even between people, but not with respect to status) isn't snobbery. So thinking that Go is wonderful and Chess is fairly dull, a fairly common attitude among Go players, isn't snobbery.

So e.g. a wine lover has very strong opinions about which wines taste better than others; a wine snob has very strong opinions about people who prefer certain wines.

It is intellectual snobbery. Chess players may assume themselves to be superior to people who do not play chess regularly as a result of having confused their fondness for chess with the intellectual acuity culturally presupposed to be necessary to play the game well. Go players can likewise mistakenly assume themselves to be superior to chess players by looking at the relative complexities of the two games and arriving at incorrect conclusions regarding the sort of people who would be enthusiastic about them. IMHO.

This is a bit off topic, but I get a little tired of all the chess bashing.

It is interesting to me that in almost 30 years of playing tournament chess, I have never heard a chessplayer put down Go or Go players. In fact, many chessplayers I have known are interested in a wide variety of games. Many years ago, I played my first games of Risk, Diplomacy, and Othello with chessplayers during chess tournaments.

I have very rarely heard serious chessplayers say that chess skill is a sign of intelligence; I hear this far more often from people who don't play chess, or who don't play it seriously.

Is it really necessary to put down chess to enjoy Go? Is someone a better person for playing Go rather than chess? My strong suspicion is that the answer to both of these questions is "no."

If you like Go better than chess, then play it. But don't be deceived into thinking that your choice of Go over chess is anything more than a personal preference, or has anything to do with the intrinsic merit of the two games, because it isn't and it doesn't.