Brain scans on domain-specific experts (math and chess are domain-specific skills) have shown activation in areas that store episodic memory. What this means, is that a large part of the "expertness" comes from efficient retrieval from long term memory (a fast pipeline between RAM and HDD, if you will). Writing to HDD, in the brain at least, is usually an incremental process.

I am not a chess player, but in go, this makes perfect sense. You start with the most basic strategies and build on them as you advance. If the skill gap is too wide you'd probably drown in confusion trying to take apart what is going on.

Granted, it's not black and white. If you're smart you'd be able to take bigger jumps and piece together several steps with each jump, in which case, for you, playing somebody faaar better is simply a reasonable next step for you, but relative to your skill level it's still a "slow" process.