My favorite episode from The Prince And The Pauper happens towards the end of the story:

"Speak up, good lad, and fear nothing," said the king. "How used you the Great Seal of England?"

Tom stammered a moment, in a pathetic confusion, then got it out:

"To crack nuts with!"

I always thought that cracking nuts with the Great Seal of England was the biggest possible misuse of something. Not anymore!

The way most people use their chess engines beats the hilarious episode from the Mark Twain's book by a wide margin!

Look at the live transmission from any chess super-tournament and you'll see a chess engine working on the side providing all the variations and evaluations for spectators. The poor viewers get used to the fact that at any point of the game they have the best possible moves in the position spoonfed to them. As a result, they forget how to think on their own and in most cases, they have a very distorted view of a real-life chess game.

I would divide such people in two opposite camps.

The first group of chess players thinks that playing chess is super easy. Well, they are right, it is indeed simple...if you have a chess engine at your fingertips! Here is an example:

I was watching the game live and just like I always do, I turned off the chess engine. I saw that after 37. Qd6, the threat 38.Qe7 is deadly and should be stopped at any cost. I also saw that 37...Qd3 was bad due to a simple combo 38.Nxe6!

While I intuitively knew that there should be a defense against 38.Qe7, I still couldn't find it! I still didn't see a defense when Karjakin quickly played his move 37...Qd3. I couldn't believe my eyes! Usually grandmasters see combinations like 38.Nxe6 almost instantly; besides, excellent tactical vision is the trademark of GM Karjakin.

I had no idea what was going on until Sergey explained it during the press conference. It turned out that he also saw that 37...Qd3 was allowing the tactical shot 38.Nxe6, but just like me he didn't see how to stop the 38.Qe7. So, in time trouble (he had about two minutes left) he had to play 37...Qd3 as the lesser evil.

This simple and honest explanation was something foreign for all the Monday-morning quarterbacks. They claimed they all saw such a simple move as 37...Qa4 instantly and Karjakin needed to learn how to play chess. By the way, I noticed that the less a person understands the subject, the more aggressive his judgment becomes!

When you explain to such people that they saw 37...Qa4 instantly only because of the computer engine working in the background, they usually say something like, "yes, I had the engine running, but believe me, even without any engine I would see this move in about 10 seconds. It is such a simple move!"

The second group of people who heavily use computer engines is just the opposite of the first group. After years of relying on chess engines, they forget how to think on their own and start believing that chess is way too complicated and only computers can play good moves.

Here is another game from the same match, Carlsen-Karjakin, as proof of this phenomenon.