[bcassedy]

I don't know enough about chess mid-game and end-game to know whether chess is the same as poker in this regard, but poker is absolutely not a game of memorization deeper into the game tree even at the highest levels. tl;dr the author knows nothing about the state of high level poker play and I suspect they don't know much about high level chess either.

Chess and poker both require memorization or at least very strong understanding of the early game. In chess this is openings and has been required for as long as I can remember. In poker this is preflop play. Poker extends this a bit into flop play, but already on the flop there is a lot of opportunity for creativity because there are countless strategies that are indistinguishable from one another within reasonable precision targets.

As you descend deeper into the game tree for turn and river play we enter into territory that cannot be memorized due to number of possibilities and the increasing impossibility of having perfectly executed all the way to the current decision point. This opens up a lot of room for creativity and exploitation.