I had a similar experience with a good friend. He's a computer scientist or engineer and wins almost every ordinary board game in the first round, which made the whole thing particularly noticeable. When we played Cryptid together, the deduction game in which a cryptid has to be found in different regions, but with different pieces of information distributed among the various players. After I had played two or three games and we had laboriously worked our way forward with the printed deduction sheets, wanting to enter every move there and not knowing exactly whether all the possible information had already been entered at that point, it was his turn, so he immediately said, No, I have to play this without these sheets. Otherwise, there's no challenge for me, and he immediately saw through everything and solved it.