All this happened, more or less.

One of the foundations for the work on expertise comes from the studies of chess masters by de Groot(1965) and Chase and Simon (1973). These seminal studies suggested that oni important key to achieving chess mastery seemed to lie in improved perceptual processing of the layout of chess pieces, rather than more rapid evaluation of legal chess moves. This perceptual skill results from years of practice. Whereas novices seem to rely on slow, conscious, deductive reasoning, experts seem to rely on fast, relatively unconscious processing - the chess master "sees" the right moves. Chase and Simon explained chess mastery in terms of the size of perceptual structures ( or chunks) that experts use relative to novices.

Exemplar Similarity and the Development of Automaticity. Thomas J. Palmeri. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Volume 23, Issue 2, March 1997, Pages 324-354