That's a well-known aspect of "expert" level chess player thinking! There's a famous experiment that demonstrated this. Researchers briefly showed set-up chess boards to novices (little to no chess experience) and expert players (2000+ ELO) and then asked the players to recreate the board they just saw. If the set-up was from a real game (not necessarily a famous or studied game) experts performed far, far better. However, if the chess board was just a random scramble of pieces, novices and experts had the same recall ability. Essentially, expert players saw the patterns at work in legitimate mid-game set-ups and this helped the recall task.