I have been practicing a couple of these games for a while via emulator in preparation for submitting a run in the "All Games - Easy" category. In order to help myself learn, I've been following the world records for the Level 1 AI's in all the games as a kind of walkthrough of what to do.

While watching ScraceHamlin's run I noticed that at one point, while the AI's king was in check, the AI chose to move a pawn that didn't help get the king out of check. I have so far been unable to replicate this (I am running on BizHawk if that makes any difference), but it also struck me as a little odd - in regular chess rules (at least the rules I remember) if your king is in check, you must move a piece in such a way that your king is no longer in check. Is there a glitch being executed here that I'm just not picking up on?

sorry for not responding until 4 years later lmao

i remember vaguely that if you press the a button during the ai's turn it skips their thought processing and they make the turns faster and reverts them to easy difficulty essentially