>> Some chess services try to check if you're playing "too perfect", but in poker that's harder to do, and there's way more money on the line.

Not really. With perfect information you know the correct strict equity plays assuming normal opponents. This doesn't give you the ultimate answer, because a player's reads and inference about another player is definitely an input - especially at the highest level - but it is more than enough to give you a winning/losing player at the small/midstakes.

source: worked for an online poker company that had these tools... and far more available to us

> a player's reads and inference about another player is definitely an input - especially at the highest level

I think player-dependent strategy is more important at lower levels because the players are much further away from what you call "normal opponents", so there's far more opportunity to exploit their mistakes.

>Some chess services try to check if you're playing "too perfect" [...]

That's interesting, could you share an example? Most of my search results are anecdotal Reddit threads about how many people cheat in online chess.

All the major online chess websites have anti-cheat mechanisms. They don't publish details of how they detect cheaters though, and I don't know how good they are.

From what I've read, they work by comparing the player's moves against chess engines, and if the player is picking engine's choice too often in positions where there are multiple roughly equal moves, they get flagged.

I always found weird that someone would want to cheat in a game like online chess. I mean, what's the point? Does anyone have insight on what's going on in the head of cheaters?

A few reasons come to mind. One is simply that if you have any metrics (ranking, win/loss ratio, greater site access..) it's going to feel nice to see them improve. Another is that losing at anything can be ego-hurting (similar reason good players sometimes sandbag with new accounts / lower ranks they can't possibly lose to, they need to 'win' more). Or reverse sandbagging/trolling with a bot might be amusing. Another is the cheater may justify it as a self-teaching game, and might not always play the strongest move but see if their move is even in consideration or try to improve ability to see the better moves by having them always pointed out -- but why not just play the bot, or save that for post-game analysis? I like to run my go games through gnugo's annotated analysis at the end (as I'm very weak I assume even the weak gnugo can teach me things), it'd be too troublesome to use it in a live game.

Other players justify cheating by convincing themselves that everyone else is cheating.

it's where the enjoyment comes from. cheaters don't enjoy the game as much as they seeing their ELO/MMR go up or in the worst case they're psychopaths who just want to mess with other people's heads.

People enjoy the the feeling of having power over others.

Even so most people don't bother with standard games online since its way too easy to cheat by mirroring the game and basically undetectable if they are good enough to not play lines that look like "computerish" moves.