Chess is all about memorization patterns it is like accounting or other boring stuff

Actually even accounting is less boring and far more practical also you are paid money. I mean you have to memorize enormous number of patterns in chess to become grandmaster or even to just become good. It takes at least 8-10 years working almost daily 8 hours to become grandmaster. Because you have to MEMORIZE that much. It is not creative game at all and amazing waste of time. What bothers me is that myth that if you are good at chess you are intelligent/have high IQ or something. If you play 30 000 games you become quite good because you played that many games and memorize many stuff. It is like other sports, talent is like 2%, 98% hard work. Change my mind.

I agree with you that being a strong chess player has little to do with general intelligence, and also that you need vast knowledge and experience to reach the top.

The relationship between that and your title (and first sentence) eludes me though. All sorts of human activities require memorization and experience but they are not boring because of that. Try learning a language. Or learning to pilot a plane. Or you name it.

What is this? Yes chess has a lot to do with memorization at a certain level but people have not achieved a GM title faster when memorization was less a thing (like 40-50 years ago).

You can try to become world-class at chess960 where there is less memorization and competition and see how it goes.

EDIT: also as @Brian-E has pointed out this type of training is required for many complex activities and is not really memorization strictly speaking (but rehearsing, practicing, fine-tuning and so on).

I do agree that too many casual players or those who are not familiar with chess think that chess is all about creativity, calculation, and coming up with ideas with brainpower.
It's been shown in chess experiments (citing Dan Heisman's "The Improving Chess Thinker") that there's a correlation with rating and position familiarity, to the point where GMs can look at half of the positions they get and immediately find the best move, or something very close to the best move, because they can immediately see a tactic, or recognize the structure and know the plans for both sides.

But it's not memorization, it's experience. Other than drilling basic tactics, which is typically done at a beginner/lower club level, no one is getting good by just memorizing positions. In fact, focus on memorizing opening lines is one of the main traps for club level improvement - they'd be better off improving their thought process, or learning general middlegame plans which don't take a lot of memorization.
If you haven't made serious attempts at chess improvement, it's hard to truly understand this.

Players who play a lot and analyze their games for mistakes will end up naturally accumulating knowledge while improving the creative aspect of their game. And this experience becomes more important at a higher level. I can easily say it's unlike any academic subject that requires memorization.

Furthermore, even with that experience, it's not enough to find good moves. It requires you to actually use that experience in your calculation and evaluation. At my level, I have to "figure out" the correct moves the large majority of the time - it doesn't just come to me. That requires real critical thinking and a real thought process, not just memorization.

Basically, the other half (or more) of chess is always "figuring out" the correct moves. There are always critical positions where the right move is not obvious, and you need to rely on your creative and calculation skills. Why do you think a lot of players in their 40s and older start declining? They have more knowledge than they did in their prime, but their mental skills decline with age.

Also, talent in chess is a major factor, but people underestimate it because it's not visible, like in basketball. At the kid level, some kids improve way faster than others, even with similar tournament participation and training. It's not really IQ but it's there.

Finally, how come some kids who play for 2-3 years become expert or even master level? Do you really think they just memorized a lot of stuff, more than veteran players who've been playing for way longer but are not on their level? This fact disproves both of your points (memorization and talent aspect).

@kluczek The fact that there is no correlation between chess skill and intelligence, and that chess is based on memorizing and visualizing patterns, does not imply that there is no creativity.
For example, to make a combination you need to "see" the possible theme and visualize the final position first, and this concerns memorization ; but then to build it you need to assemble the stored information: and this is certainly creative.
Occasionally I manage to do a combination ( very simple ones, given my level ), but generally it's not like they come to me simply because I'd already memorized them somewhere. I build them, then and there; and in this lies the satisfaction I feel, on the very rare occasions that it happens. I think it's like this for everyone.
But even looking for a combination without finding it is creative ; as well as trying to formulate a plan, or imagine/calculate any maneuver in the endgame, and so on.

To me this and everything else is anything but boring.

We're all trained apes learning patterns in our hobbies, jobs, RL.

What now`? What's the fuzz about? Are you different or what?

@crtex While I agree with your statement on talent and with your post overall I would add two other things:

1. Nowadays 1h of serious training time (not nonsense like bullet or what I'm doing with this account) can get you much further in terms of objective strength than 20, or even 10 years ago. Stockfish, excellent training courses and better learning plattforms do exist compared to earlier.

2. Kids do quite crazy hours training/playing tournaments. And they tend to be open to look at things and just learn them. When I try to bring some of our older folks to look at (for example) a chessable course and study it (as they SHOULD at their level) I'm mostly hearing stuff about "too old to memorize things, let's drink a beer and play some blitz games". Same attitude with tournament participation.

3. I feel that on average the attitude has become a bit more competitive, e.g. more serious training, more tourneys, stricter regime during tourneys, as is the case with other sports. That point is quite negligible though compared to 1) and 2)

Just for your info, the OP's account is closed.

Sarg0n says: It's easier to become a troll than a GM.

"... an experienced trainer can detect [chess talent] almost immediately. A talented youngster absorbs chess knowledge more quickly, and uses it more effectively. He quickly identifies the main points in what his trainer tells him, or in what he reads in books, correctly identifies the moments when it is right to follow this or that chess principle, or to use a certain technical device.
Talented children can usually play blindfold games almost immediately. They move quickly, calculate variations rapidly, and are good at blitz and rapid games. ... Grandmaster B, at the age of 12, played so fast that, in a bid to get him to slow down and play thoughtfully, I advised him to write down in an exercise book all the moves he had considered, before actually playing his move. The child took no more than one minute to write down seven (!) candidate moves, and to play an eighth. Now that is talent! ..." - Alexander Vaisman (~2009)
"... going from good at tactics to great at tactics ... doesn't translate into much greater strength. ... You need a relatively good memory to reach average strength. But a much better memory isn't going to make you a master. ... there's a powerful law of diminishing returns in chess calculation, ... Your rating may have been steadily rising when suddenly it stops. ... One explanation for the wall is that most players got to where they are by learning how to not lose. ... Mastering chess ... requires a new set of skills and traits. ... Many of these attributes are kinds of know-how, such as understanding when to change the pawn structure or what a positionally won game looks like and how to deal with it. Some are habits, like always looking for targets. Others are refined senses, like recognizing a critical middlegame moment or feeling when time is on your side and when it isn't. ..." - What It Takes to Become a Chess Master by GM Andrew Soltis (2012)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140708093409/https://www.chesscafe.com/text/review857.pdf