Is the winning the game mostly about pattern recognition?

Played my last 30 minute game (lost).  I was using the time to try and think and noted that my opponent made moves in the fraction of a second after I moved, never making a mistake.  A highly rated mentor suggested that the best chess players are very, very good at pattern recognition, and are able to do it very quickly.

If so, I suspect getting above 1200 at chess will require the same level of study and practice as mastering Mandarin.  I’m just not that bright and don’t have enough years left on earth to reach the level most people here have already reached.  TBH I thought I was better but obviously am not, and I don’t have the mental faculties to get where I would like to be.

Mostly it is about pattern recognition but it is also about practice 😭 I lost most of the games I've been playing lately because I kept missing wins.... The instincts I have and the chess I've been playing seems to go in different directions, activating the castle by bringing it to an open file which happens to be the opponents kingside and having a queen on the 2nd rank and not seeing it leads to checkmate loses a lot of games. And those are the ones that I have been playing 😭😭😭😭

OP--at your level, focus on fundamentals of piece development,  king safety,  avoiding hanging pieces, good move selection.  Most games are lost thru mistakes and blunders not pattern recognition.   It is important to understand basic attacking combinations and concepts and how to create positions to employ them.  This is "pattern recognition." Puzzles help with this.  Longer time control games help with development of good fundamentals. 

Yes, chess skill is dominated by pattern recognition.  However, if you're trying to learn the game, that doesn't really tell you that much.

With the caveat that I'm not a great player, nevertheless, I can say that playing a lot of games has given me a mental library of bits and pieces of positions that, when I see them on the board, trigger me to think "I've seen this before and it needs a response."

Here's a (somewhat artificial) example, white to move:

If I'm in this position as white, considering my move, I immediately see there's a risk of the black queen taking the b2 pawn and giving up a free rook.  My eye is drawn to this because I've had that done to me (making up a number) let's say 50 times in the past, and it always hurts.  I probably would reflexively play c3 but the best move is c4 because it threatens another pawn and uses the white queen to defend.

With practice, as you start to see board positions that resemble those you've seen before, that memory will do a lot to help prioritize and direct your calculation.  The reason blitz or bullet chess are even possible is that pattern recogition lets an experienced player skip over calculating many things and just jump to the result.

So, we've answered your question in the affirmative.  What now?  How do you train your pattern recogition?

Puzzles offer one answer.  Doing simple tactics puzzles, you'll start to see more easily a move or two ahead to situations where you can force your opponent to accept a position that doesn't favor them.  A strategy that I know has helped my own play is to work on a collection of puzzles and do them over and over.  Memorizing the answer is not just ok, it's the point.  Then, when you see something vaguely similar in your own game, you'll feel a little tickle that there's something you should calculate.

But, the bulk of your pattern recognition will come about through playing games and analyzing them.  Calling attention to your mistakes helps you remember them and increases the chance that you can bypass them in the future.

Puzzles may seem like the closest we have to "pattern recognition practice," but they really serve two purposes.  One is to learn patterns you'll remember in a game with puzzles that you practice until you can do them quickly from memory, and another is to exercise visualization and calculation skills that you'll use in your own games with puzzles that are more challenging and less obvious. 

I wouldn't get too hung up on the idea of pattern recognition as such, though.  That may be how your brain learns the game, but it doesn't particularly lead to a practice regimen that's very different from what any of the informed instructors on this site would tell you to do to get better.  Do lessons, read books, analyze games, play games, analyze your own games, and do puzzles.

Pattern recognition is important, but intuition and courage are also important. I suggest, however, that instead of worrying about reaching a particular rating you simply enjoy chess. Pick a great player from the past and study his or her games. Try to understand why they win. If you do this you will find that the game is teaching itself to you in a fun and rewarding way.

If you view chess as a kind of job where you regard yourself as a complete failure unless you have reached goal A by date B, you are missing the point entirely.

If you play 30 minute you can outplay people without the patterns burnt in as well now blitz or faster time controls they will torch you for sure but as someone who will hang queens mate in 1 or well anything when i have to move in 5 seconds or less I have about double the rating in the slower formats.  That being said the more i play and the better the pattern recognition gets the better I get overall  in all formats.  Certainly a different skill set when you compare extremes hyper bullet where players pre move half the moves and go off instinct and daily where i can spend 2 hours analyzing with the built in board and check all the moves systematically.  Also plenty of space in between with classical and rapid and blitz. But yes the more you play the better you get and not because you calculate better per say but you see patterns better don't miss blunders in your calculations because you have deeper understanding.  

I watched some people play some custom bullet 960 games and the accuracy of these super high rated players was abysmal because all the patterns are different on a 960 board.  Lots of its very specific and most players have memorized systems so be it slow or fast they have memorized or attempted to memorize the first 10-15 moves.