Oh come on. An avid chess player could beat even the most powerful bot. I'm pretty sure that chess is one of the hardest board games to "exploit" with automation. [...]
Tell that to Kasparov - where have you been these last 20 years?
Chess is a perfect information game (that is, a game where both players have full knowledge of the complete state of the game), with relatively few movement options - perfect for computers to play, and win, against humans. Furthermore, their capabilities only improve with each passing year, alongside processing power and changes in programming techniques.
Assuming they make their own engine, and most of the gambling is rather small, I doubt anyone will spend the effort to develop a bot for this.
Anyways, I see this as completely fair. I can imagine that every single person competing would just end up downloading a chess AI and manually copying in the moves.
It's going to be about who can google "free chess software" better.
There are ''counter chess engines'' out there in many famous chess websites that can detect you using a powerful engine by looking at your moves and you will get caught, believe me, of course its not infallible but it's better than nothing.