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.
Maybe they should compare playing chess with playing Go.
The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10^170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated to be on the order of 10^80.
My point is that checkers actually still is very mich complex. Tictactoe is not and every board position can reasonably be managed by a human.
With checkers, that is unfeasable. That's why I am of the opinion that checkers is unfairly treated as "the simple game" when for humans it is far from simple.
I usually take the chess/checkers idiom to be more like "the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing" Not that one is smart and one is dumb, but that they're going in completely different directions and playing by different rules.