This notion is completely and utterly false. In fact, it is _spectacularly_ wrong.

The strongest checkers playing entity in the world is the program Chinook -- vastly stronger than any human that has ever lived. It was written by my supervisor, Jonathan Schaeffer, who is a mediocre checkers player, at best.

The Othello program Logistello *crushed* the human world champion 6-0 in a 1997 match. It's author, my friend Michael Buro, claims to be a weak Othello player.

For the game of Lines of Action (LoA), I wrote a program called Mona that won the de facto world championship in 2000, and has won every game it has ever played against the world's best human players. I don't play LoA at all. (More than once I questioned a choice of Mona's, only to discover that my preferred move was, in fact, illegal. :)

I know a lot about poker, but that could actually be a hindrance to writing a world-beater program. Finding the best algorithmic solutions to a problem is not based solely on the personal knowledge the programmer has about the domain.

    - Darse.

http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/poker/