Why did they hate chess?

The long quote by Poe (pictured here) seems to indicate he knew how to play both chess and checkers, and that he didn't know what he was talking about. I like checkers BTW but his comparison of the games is nonsensical drivel...was he a disgruntled chessplayer? Objectively checkers is considerably less complex than chess, and the proof is that computers have now established that checkers, like tic-tac-toe and unlike chess and go, is a "closed strategy game." 

"To calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess player, for example, does one without effort of the other. I will therefore take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In the latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold, but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative, rather than the more acute player who conquers.In draughts on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively, unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen" EDGAR ALLAN POE

"The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind." EDGAR ALLAN POE

"A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them."

WILLIAM HAZLITT (British Writer, best known for his humanistic essays. 1778-1830)

"Lifes too short for chess" HENRY JAMES

“Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.”                                                                                               GEORGE STEINER, US Critic, Scholar and Educator

"Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time"   GEORGE BERNARD SHAW  (1856 - 1950, Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist; 1925 Nobel Prize winner for Literature)

"Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency."  RAYMOND CHANDLER (American Writer, author of detective fiction,1888-1959) BUT his famous detective Philip Marlowe played chess! In fact he is the "source" of this quote in Chandler's novel "The Long Goodbye"