Interesting but I believe that there are events where computers + humans beat just the computers. That shows that there must still be something else that the human adds to the situation that brute force hasn't been able to overcome yet.
But now the AIs are gaining superior pattern recognition as well. AlphaGo beat expert Go players by training a neural network to recognize good Go moves. Just like how a human would play. And then it combined that with the computers natural ability to search millions of moves. Humans can't add anything to this type of AI.
To say that Deep Blue beat Kasparov with nothing but brute-force speed is to neglect the rather intelligent decisions it made, ascribing different weights to pieces in potential sacrifices, positions, development of pieces, control of the center, initiative, and all the other values that a human player uses to play chess.
But it's just an evaluation function anyway. A very complex one, but still nothing else. Chess engine doesn't have a notion of a plan (which is how a human approaches chess). All it does is mechanically keep on steering the game towards positions that are evaluted as best by the function.
I wouldn't say so entirely--It's possible to predict multiple moves ahead (before the number of possibilities explodes), and a heuristic is a sort of plan too.
What you're describing sounds like a greedy algorithim more than anything else.