In June of 2021 the biggest online chess website, chess.com, organized a live simultaneous exhibition charity event. One of the strongest players in the world, a former world champion and (at the time) the strongest player in India, Viswanathan Anand, played a simultaneous match against several high-profile celebrities and other people.
One of these people was Nikhil Kamath, a compatriot of Anand, and one of the richest people in India. He is not a very strong chess player, quite a beginner in fact. Thus, it immediately rose everybody's eyebrows when he easily beat Anand in their match, his level of play being absolutely beyond anything that a beginner player could ever manage to do. It was immediately apparent that he had used a chess engine to cheat in the match (and further analysis of the game confirmed what was already immediately obvious.) He himself quickly confessed to doing so.
This, quite naturally, caused huge controversy, as not only is cheating in chess in this manner extremely frowned upon, but on top of that he did so in a charity event, and against one of the strongest and highest-profile players in the world, a former world champion.
But why? Why would someone cheat like this, especially in such a high-profile event like this, against such a high-profile player? What was going through his head?
Rather obviously I cannot read minds and thus there's no way for me to know for certain what he was thinking, but this is what I'm hypothesizing:
People who are not familiar with chess and chess tournaments, who might have never played the game or have only played extremely little, and have no experience at all on tournaments and online play, often do not understand how serious of a thing it is to use a chess engine to cheat in a game.
In fact, some time ago a friend of mine, when the topic of online chess came up, presented me with his novel idea and asked me if it would be possible to use a chess program to tell you what to play when playing online against someone. From his tone and how he explained his idea, it was very clear that he had absolutely no idea nor concept of how common cheating in this manner online is, and how frowned upon it is. He seemed to be genuinely and extremely naively asking this as if it had been a novel idea he came up with, and clearly had no idea how common it was, or what kind of repercussions it would have if done.
Of course I cannot possibly know for sure, but I have my suspicion that something similar happened with Mr Kamath: It may well be that, being a rather beginner player, he just didn't understand how serious it is to use a chess engine to cheat, especially against such a high-profile strong player as Anand.
Maybe he thought that it would be a fun little way to make things interesting. Like perhaps some kind of small little innocent prank. Wouldn't it be interesting and amusing if out of the blue one of players in the simultaneous match played very strongly and even beat the world champion? Now that would be something to tell stories about later! What a little innocent joke that he did, pranking the former world champion like that. Surely they would be laughing at it afterwards. And, on top of that, the game itself would probably turn out interesting!
He probably didn't know, and the idea didn't cross his mind, nor did he do any kind of research beforehand, about how huge of a faux pas this kind of cheating is, and how frowned upon it is, how disrespectful and inappropriate it is, especially in this kind of even against this kind of high-profile player. The enormous backlash after the game probably came as a surprise to him. It was probably something he didn't think about much before the event, and only later did he realize what a stupid mistake had made when the entire thing blew up in his face.
It's easy to say "he should have known, or even at least done a quick google search about the subject", but when you are not an aficionado of something, such things don't necessarily occur to you. It just doesn't cross your mind to check, or to think that hey, maybe I'm doing something that I shouldn't be doing.
