I'm not a chess master myself, my knowledge of this topic is from what I've read of Kasparov. The guy is all about patterns. He even advises to play using a phy

I'm not a chess master myself, my knowledge of this topic is from what I've read of Kasparov. The guy is all about patterns. He even advises to play using a physical board as much as possible, to improve _visual_ recognition of patterns. Thing is, you might not even recognize this as "pattern recognition" per se. Call it "intuition", call it "experience", or whatever you like, but combinatorially I'm pretty sure you're not searching the entire tree of possible positions several moves ahead - that's literally impossible to do for a human to do in the finite time allotted to a game. You're relying on patterns to constrain the search, much like a modern neural algorithm would constrain its search using a cost function. That's what's meant by "pattern recognition" here, not rigid recognition of fixed positions. That is also combinatorially impossible for a human to precisely memorize.