It really is an insult for checkers as a game. It is a common misconception that it’s simple. The game has surprising amount of depth, and the saying “x is playing chess while y is playing checkers” should really die.

X is playing chess while Y is playing tictactoe would be a better analogy.

Chess has roughly 10^44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10^20.

That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.

Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.

In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.