That’s a good point. I once read an article about a research study on how the human mind works when dealing with things that follow predictable patterns over time. They had 50 top chess players play games against 50 beginners, and the top players won every game. They then sat all the players down at chess boards with pieces arranged in a random fashion that didn’t come from a normal game in progress, and the top players lost quite a few games.
There’s an unfortunate problem that afflicts games in general at very high levels of play, that there ends up being a lot more rote execution of optimized game play than of the creative and emergent type. Kind of defeats the point of playing a game when all one does is execute a script.
Chess is particularly afflicted by this as every reasonable opening has been studied to death to the Nth move.