Why do people think chess is harder than checkers?

"Tactical madness" in this case does not matter, the obligation to take in some cases reduces complexity in other increases it. In chess at least tactics can go very well beyond human comprehention. What can be measured is the amount of competition and the skill ceiling in which again chess is superior.

Also same goes for Go. Whoever thinks Go is more complex then chess confuses the total number of possibilities with complexity. in practical terms the number of possible games for both games is infinite, the complete mastery is humanly unatainable but chess has fiercer competition therefore it is harder to be the best.

chess is hard if you be ignorant most of the time (But if your a beginner/play just for fun then it wouldn't really count).

@Morozov chess has fiercer competition than Go? This is not true in Asia - in fact top Go players are paid significantly more than top chess players

Just because two games are impossible for humans to play 100% accurately doesn't mean they have equal complexity. The level of competition available is a seperate thing. There can be a lot of competition even for very simple games, or little for complex ones.

Compared to chess - Go games last longer, there are more possibilities on each move and there are more possible positions. Also there are more 'reasonable' moves on each turn. In chess there's usually one 1 or 2 sensible options, even if there are 30+ legal moves. The difficulties computers have had with Go (compared to chess) also speaks to it's greater complexity.

@tipau not at all, just because it is more difficult for a computer to play says nothing about the difficulty for humans. Some calculations are very simple for calculators, while playing most RTS games even with odds AI sucks ass.
@soni777 Ing Cup is a tournament sponsored by Ing Chang-ki, Yomiuri Shimbun, the Nihon-Kiin and the Kansai-Kiin every four years. The winner's purse is $500,000. The current title holder (2016) is Tang Weixing. This is the highest prize i found.
Well no Chess is more competitive globaly and the FIDE WC gets far more than that.

BTW, isn‘t checkers always draw if played perfect?

@Morozov I suspect you haven't played much Go. If you take a typical chess position and ask 10 different GMs what they'd play you'd probably have only a couple of different suggestions, while the same situation for Go you could easily get a different move from all of them. Games of Go have huge tactical and positional battles on multiple fronts, while chess action is usually more concentrated and the tactical operations over more quickly. Anyway, I think it's generally accepted throughout the world that Go is the more complex game. A chess forum is probably one place where you could expect some people to still argue about it, for obvious reasons.

This is not about how hard is a particular board game, but at least more exact :)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity

All I have to say is the reason that checkers has less grand masters is incentive. Would you rather watch a game that has... just go here for the numbers: http://www.chess-poster.com/english/notes_and_facts/did_you_know.htm . Where checkers has http://sciencenetlinks.com/science-news/science-updates/checkers-solved/ (500 billion billion) possible positions. In 4 moves, chess has 288 billion positions. Mind-blown.

Agree: if you play chess on a blanket and checkers on a wooden board then checkers is harder of course.