is this game just memorization?

My coworkers got me interested in playing chess a few days ago. I've played it here and there during my teenage years, and I never really understood any of the tactics in the game. I was losing more than I was winning for the last day or so. This morning, I decided to look up and memorize a few standard openings, and suddenly, I was winning a lot more games and having a decent accuracy score. I'm still in a low elo (~640), but I'm having doubts about continuing because I'm put off at the idea of just endlessly memorizing different algorithms. Is this a bad take of the game? how would you recommend getting good without memorizing things a bunch?

You don’t really have to memorize openings really far until like 2000. Why you could have had success after memorizing openings is that you didn’t really know opening principles, leading to you getting a very bad position very fast, and knowing those openings solved that. Memorizing more especially at lower elo absolutely does not mean you get better, you can try memorizing a 20 move line of nimzo Indian theory, but the chances that your opponent will play the right moves for you to use that like is astronomically low. Knowing a couple endgame techniques can be very useful at low rating, probably better than memorizing openings, but they’re very easy to learn and honestly I wouldn’t even qualify the simple ones as memorizing.

Doing puzzles and reviewing your games should help you improve much faster than just memorizing more openings.

How many puzzles would you recommend doing as a beginner to the game? Should this be a main focus, or would it be better to just play more games?

Hola

yes, you memorize how to chomp on hanging pieces

At the higher level is mostly memorization of theory and previous games for me

Pattern recognition is FAR more important than mere memorization of moves.

There are certain checkmating patterns called "model mates" that are very useful to learn because they can become new "tools in your toolbox", just like Knight forks or back-rank checkmates are.

An example:

Greco's mate is characterized by the enemy King being held in the corner by a Bishop while your Queen administers the checkmate along the file.

Let me know if you are interested in seeing a few more of those mating patterns... Lolli mates, Smothered mate, Legal's mate, etc.

That 2nd one was pretty nifty.

Practice and board vision is essential. Until you can see the entire board and not just the 16 squares of interest, you are going to have issues.

That, and you have to work on the cognitive biases that your brain is susceptible to, as explained by coaches such as Dr. Can & NM Dan Heisman.

you're not there yet, don't worry.

To get good at almost anything, you need to remember things. For example, if you're an engineer and forget the right formula, or if you're a wielder and forget which tool to use in which order.... And in chess, you need to remember things like your mistakes, openings, tactical patterns, positional patterns, and more. So you could argue that chess is mostly memorization.

But thankfully, chess is a logical game. Principles can be deduced if you know the reasoning, and you can apply them in many situations. Calculation is something to be trained, not memorized. And patterns are ingrained through repetition, not rote memorization.

While openings can improve your results, they won't improve your level play (someone who plays openings like a grandmaster, but the rest of the game like an 800, will probably be rated 900-1200) - it may help you overcome a small rating hurdle, but at the end of the day, if you wish to get better, you have to improve on actually playing the game, which isn't about memorization.

Hopefully, what I said makes sense.

> is this game just memorization?

No