chapotraphouse

Well no, it's not a memorization game. Part of a grandmaster's strategy is deciding when to go "off book" and cause their opponent to have to reason through a position. An attribute of a chess engine like Stockfish is its "depth" which is a measurement of how many permutations it searches through in a tree of possibilities. You get some ridiculous number of permutations very quickly on a chess board.

That's not to say that a competitor doesn't do anything assload of memorization of the "correct" moves as proven in landmark games. But you don't just memorize chess and solve it as such like you can do with tic tac toe. Unrelated but I think a spectrum is fun: tic tac toe, solved, memorizable. Connect 4, solved, unmemorizable. Checkers, surprisingly solved, in your dreams. Chess, unsolved.