Is chess just memorization?

While there is more to remember as you improve over time, Chess doesn't require a lot of memorizing. You need to know the rules, knowing the ideas of a checkmate pattern like rook and king vs king is good. Not a lot to memorize though. Avoid hanging your pieces, make sure your pieces can move and do things. Tactics have a bit of memory to them, but you aren't memorizing specific moves, just looking ahead a bit. Don't focus too much on memorizing things, it sucks away attention to just paying basic attention to the board. 

I'm glad to hear it's not just memorization, just wish they would make that more obvious. For instance I have been trying to learn how to study the 1.e4 opening, they all seem to say well if you start with the King pawn opening you need to know these eight variations based off of how black responds. It comes across to my feable mind when opponent plays this, the proper response is "this" and I just get lost.

opening theory alone can't get you past move 25 (unless you're playing some weird semi slav sicilian type stuff), so no

I'd say half is memorizing openings and tactics, and half is playing 8. Nfe5 for no reason other than hating dealing with knights

You absolutely do NOT need to memorise anything to learn and enjoy, and win games of chess (except the rules I guess lol). There's plenty in chess you CAN memorise, and that can be helpful, particularly with opening lines for example, but most people on here will tell you when you're starting out that its much better to learn principles rather than memorise lines. That is, learn opening principles for the opening, practice puzzles and learn about different tactics, mating patterns etc, to help you recognise these situations in game. 

In fact, you'll get far more satisfaction from this process in any case. The thrill when you actually spot a 2 or 3 move forcing tactic in a game is much more satisfying than just playing out a memorised line of moves which you don't truly understand the point of anyway. Spotting those tactics doesn't happen much at first, but stick with, it'll come!

Leave the memorisation until much later in your chess journey. Right now, just keep doing the lessons, watching the beginner youtube stuff, asking questions on the forums, and keep on losing games until you reach your true current rating and start getting pared with players who are at the same level as you.

memorization is brute forcing pattern recognition. 

For a few theoretical ending positions , memorizing is best, as is memorizing in CERTAIN types of opening lines where very subtle differences can have significant evaluation consequences, but ideally, you would grow to undertand what you memorized, this makes the task of remembering far more likely to suceed in an actual game (besides the very obvious, how to checkmate with a rook, winning tecnique when you up a pawn etc, you shoudnt need pointers for these)

but fortunately, the vast majority of chess is pattern recognition where memorization is just completely unnecessary.  Chess masters usually dont memorize thousands of positions usually (unless they have eidetic memory, or are otherwise VERY strong, even for masters), but what they have done is gain exposure to thousands upon thousands of tabiyas that are like a conceptual toolbox, so when they encounter a critical position, these smaller combinations are second nature to them and they must calculate to confirm/refute concrete possibilities. 

Here is an example, if you understand the tabiya of the knight smothered mate, to spot the 4 move combination is as obvious as how obvious taking back a piece in a trade is for a club player. player . Your conceptual horizon is simply deeper,with far less effort.

Chess is so much pattern recognition, that even when you are quite rusty, you rarely drop more than 300 points in strength or so, because the raw exposure to so many tabiyas is still there. This is why its much easier to be a rusty master getting back in top playing shape, vs breaking through to that rating peak the first time around.

karpov is a player who don't know about theory of the opening his main idea is to make opponent piece weak and win using that advantage 

There's a lot of memorization in openings.  There's little memorization in the middle game, and in the end game, it's useful to memorize a few key positions and rules of thumb, but mostly it's counting and calculation.

My answer to the OP was going to be "yes, but not in the way you think."

Basically chess is pattern recognition, yeah.

my answer is no

Beginners tend to be interested in openings, so lessons in the opening are mainly what's produced and marketed... but it's also one of the most useless things you can study... too bad for new players wishing to improve.

Tactics, strategy, endgames, and playing long games are all more important than purchasing some ridiculous opening guide. Just use the opening principals and memorize a few moves deep in a few main lines you play (yes memorization is useful, but only a very limited amount as a new player).

we can even play chess with  memorization

 Ur looking at this game wrong & the light bulb will light at some point. 

I think everyone misunderstood the opening poster's point. To me it seems like the opening poster tries to play a whole game by memorizing opening moves. The correct answer to that is to point out that there are much more possible chess games than atoms in the universe. Much more.

You should stop studying openings and you should stop listening to those people who told you that "you need to know these eight variations".

Google "opening principles" and read those. That is more than enough to know about openings.

If you want to get better at chess, this is the way:

https://www.chess.com/puzzles

Chess is about playing, making mistakes, losing, analysing, learning from your mistakes, remembering the lessons learnt.

I sympathize with the OP, and would offer the highly debatable (but please let's not) suggestion to play a few hundred (or thousand) blitz games just to learn one opening direction for your black and white games.  When I started I was always getting blown up in the opening, now I can generally get to the middlegame (and get blown up there).  I'm still terrible but sometimes reach fun endgames against fellow low-rated players.  The idea here is that for me repetition replaced memorization.  Even with easy/fun opening videos like Gotham I lose it memory-wise after he shows even a few variations, as the board to me is still a blur of squares.

If you know it's highly controversial and are saying it anyways, saying a "but please don't" debate it is rather pointless. Players don't really get blown out in the opening for opening reasons frankly, it's usually because they blunder pieces for no reason/middlegame and tactics issues. I have many times faced openings I know nothing about and stayed even ahead most of the time anyways just making up generic moves based on my basic understanding of the game.