You can just go 'this move is winning, and I can infer that because of these logical points'. This isn't really 'looking ahead x moves into the future', you can just know a position is winning and will cause a cascade of moves of a predictable-length that will end in an eventual checkmate.
If you call this 'looking ahead x moves' or not depends on the definition I guess, but I just mean they might not be actually evaluating / imagining all those positions (because you can either use logic or pattern-match to previous situations).
> You can just go 'this move is winning, and I can infer that because of these logical points'. This isn't really 'looking ahead x moves into the future', you can just know a position is winning
Yes, that's exactly what I said in my original comment.