I only took one A.I. class in school and had a few that involved games as projects and remember several times the lecturers/professors (10 years ago) mentioning that Go was a next level target after chess due to extremely high branching factor.
(EDIT: Specifically last year I was witness to a lot of threads regarding the quality of the AI in the video game Civilization 6 that asserted that poor AI in video games was no longer excusable since computers now beat experts at Go...)
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/mystery-ai-just-crushed-best-h...
The list of things that humans do better than computers is getting very short very fast.
It's true that poker is not completely solved, but neither is chess. It is still not known whether white has a forced win. It is possible that some day this will be known, and if the answer is yes, then a human playing white may be able to learn the strategy and hence beat any machine. But that will be only marginally more interesting than the fact that a human player can force a draw in tic-tac-toe. The difference between "fallen" and "solved" is just not that interesting. Checkers is solved, but no one cares.
I see no reason to believe that the techniques used to beat the best human players in one variant of poker cannot be extended to beat the best human players in any variant of poker, or, for that matter, to any game with randomness and hidden state.
Particularly, it's usually a multiplayer game at the outset, and has many varieties other than hold 'em (which just happens to be the currently—and this is a fairly recent development—popular form.)
I expect StarCraft will be the next professionally played game to experience destruction at the hands of AI. Then it will be clear that "fog of war" doesn't matter much in the decision tree from a probabilistic perspective.
The irony being that faced with a "fog of war" maybe you do want to underestimate your opponent because then, if you end up surviving, you can claim brilliant insight and leadership which bolsters the short-term position, even though in fact you simply were lucky. So in the open-ended problem of tactical maneuvering in business or war, AI might not have an advantage any time soon.
The difference is quite drastic.
This means that the history of the game is pretty much irrelevant. Usually only the last two moves are important because you can't recapture a stone and get to the very same position as two moves before. It's called the ko rule (another unfortunate word clash with English.)
There is also triple ko (three linked kos), which requires to remember more moves back, like for repeated positions in chess. A go game with a triple ko has no result: there is no draw so the game must be played again if in a tournament. It's very rare.
True under Japanese rules. Chinese rules at least theoretically use a superko rule. But many comments online say in practice the game is voided under Chinese rules too.
There don't seem to be good Stratego computer AIs (which actually surprised me a little). But I can easily believe that's at least in part because not a huge amount of effort has been put into it.
Add in the fact that each player needs to build their own deck (choosing from 20,000+ cards) and that new cards are printed regularly, significantly shifting the expected metagame, and building an AI that can routinely win in a larger card pool format like Modern or Vintage seems absurdly difficult.
The poor AI in Civ is repeatedly based around smart systems stacked on top of each other.
So imagine Software Development, you decide you want to add 10 AI systems to run aspects of the AI. You build all 10 AI systems, each one doing a thing.
Then you add them all together, and they all clash. That's Civ AI.
It's almost deterministic in that, all the AI systems fight each other in a consistent way, so you could have just ignored writing all your complicated AI, and made the AI just follow a single decision tree, and it would be the same results. Except a single decision tree would follow logic. Random systems competing with each other, has no real logic.
Then when AI problems come about, the programmers tweak the systems to fix a single problem, which can maybe work, but will break many other things in the process.
So each Civ game, to fix the AI, you start by shutting off all the AI systems one by one. The goal being when I ask the game to do X, X occurs.
Once you get all the stuff removed so you can actually make the game do something, you then create actions that make things happen.
That can make the game has significantly insanely good AI. The best example of this is a mod in Civ 5 called Vox Popeli which has the most profound Civ AI anyone has come up with, and takes ideas from all the Civ modders.
To get the AI to a point where the Human thinks it's good is not particularly hard if you focus on simple, easy to understand concepts, and not large systems that are supposed to cover every possibility organically.
Modern Go AI also has "intuitive" components just like we do (large neural networks trained to immediately provide a heat map of what should be the next best move). That NN is not limited by board size.
BTW, even when playing by "intuition" alone (no tree search), AlphaGo is still incredibly strong. It would still beat most amateur players that way.
AlphaGo should be able to be retrained using different variables/game rules.