That's a well-known aspect of "expert" level chess player thinking! There's a famous experiment that demonstrated this. Researchers briefly showed set-up chess boards to novices (little to no chess experience) and expert players (2000+ ELO) and then asked the players to recreate the board they just saw. If the set-up was from a real game (not necessarily a famous or studied game) experts performed far, far better. However, if the chess board was just a random scramble of pieces, novices and experts had the same recall ability. Essentially, expert players saw the patterns at work in legitimate mid-game set-ups and this helped the recall task.
Yes this is an interesting result that I recall from my days when I was into chess.
But this result speaks to something more general that is interesting as well. It seems high levels of skill in many other fields is associated with incredible ability to recall details about a performance in that field. If I recall correctly, Bobby Fischer was able to perfectly recall positions (and his analysis of them) from games he had played years ago (and consider how many games a professional chess player might play in a career).
The question I have is, what exactly is the connection? Is this association essential? And is it the incredible memory that leads to high skill, or the it's the reverse?
