Recently, kinetic proofreading scenarios have been proposed for the regulation of chromatin remodeling, first on purely theoretical grounds (Blossey and Schiessel 2008 HFSP J. 2 167-70) and deduced from experiments on the ISWI/ACF system (Narlikar 2010 Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol. 14 660). In the kinetic proofreading scenario of chromatin remodeling, the combination of the recognition of a histone tail state and ATP-hydrolysis in the remodeler motor act together to select (i.e. proofread) a nucleosomal substrate. ISWI remodelers have recently been shown to have an additional level of regulation as they contain auto-inhibitory motifs which need to be inactivated through an interaction with the nucleosome. In this paper we show that the auto-regulatory effect enhances substrate recognition in kinetic proofreading. We further report some suggestive additional insights into the molecular mechanism underlying ISWI-autoregulation.