Cute analogy for your strawman argument. Allow me to explain why you’re wrong.
Because of the amount of complexities in Pokémon, which far surpasses chess in quantity but maybe not execution, there are bound to be many combinations of: BST, movepool, ability, and typing, that just don’t perform as well as others. Conversely, there are some that are simply too powerful, but the gap in strength between the worst competitively viable Pokémon and the best even by smogon OU standards is way bigger than the power gap of a pawn or a queen.
Not to mention, most chess pieces play similarly, the move X spaces in Y direction, some have unique abilities but aren’t broken, and the amount of “OP” piece”s” you have are limited so it cannot be abused.
I would say chess is a better game than your average cart match because, like smogon, it takes into account the power and availability of the pieces to make a fair and balanced game for everyone, and not to mention, the only literal difference between two chess players is their mind and how they move their pieces, where the difference in power between two teams of Pokémon can overcome the gap in intelligence, something that could never happen in chess, and doesn’t happen as often as in cart, but go ahead and list all OU nat dex fanfic meta Pokémon that don’t belong there in your NPC response, that’ll show me.
