I watched the livestreams of Andrea Botez's games in Vegas. Something I was really struck by is even though she's not a GM strength player, her mental board visualization skills are way up there. She did post game debriefs on the streams where she went rapid fire through hundreds of variations with her cohost just verbally. She'd go through them faster than the host could click to show chat at times.
Now imagine what people like the Super GMs are capable of.
They put a number of mid-game positions on the board, and Magnus was able to guess the players, tournament, game number, who won, what the next few moves were. Who was playing on the table next to him. What their moves were.
Yeah. This is why I think those people are full of shit.
First, those people should look at his YouTube. Obviously he's capable of analyzing games. To think he'd be incapable of analyzing a game he just played? What? It makes no sense.
To think that someone, even if they were cheating in every game, was not a 2600ish rated player and to perform like Hans is just ridiculous. Every 2600 player can out analyze anyone who is a 2100 player (Botez).
You don't have to imagine, check out any post match press conference or when players discuss over the board after the game.
They remember all the variations they consider, and they've considered most of the variations their opponents have calculated, so the variations aren't new branches, they're just pointers to spots in the game tree both players have in their heads.
Now imagine what people like the Super GMs are capable of.