I respect chess players in the same way I respect speed runners or people who learn to do Rubik's cubes in under 30 seconds: I find it cool and impressive, but there is no way I am going to dedicate the time to memorizing every single possibility of this very specific set of rules.
Oddly enough, I did memorize how to solve a Rubik's cube at one point, and it did make a kind of sense when I started to see it for how it works, but I quickly saw that I was at the foot of a very tall mountain that I was fine hanging out at the foothills of. Chess I didn't even get that far.
I really enjoy chess but I get my arse handed to me more often than not. Definitely my favourite of all the classic board games but it's hard finding the time / opponents to play for me (and I REALLY need some practice)
I love it, and I'm terrible at it. But for me that applies to a bunch of other competitive multiplayer games: Starcraft, Dota/HOTS/MOBA flavor of the month, Overwatch, etc...
I'm a little surprised though by the reaction of so many that chess "isn't deep" or "has had all the fun sucked out of it after a thousand years of analysis", both of which are patently untrue. Modern rules are only about 200 years old, and modern competitive chess only around 150ish. The "meta" surrounding chess constantly changes, just over a slower timespan than most of us are used to from video games, and then usually only at a competitive level. In fact, chess is going through a pretty massive change over the last twenty years or so, since the use of chess AI has opened up a completely new world of strategy and caused human players to reexamine a lot of the holy cows of the game.
The fun of chess is just like the fun in pretty much any competitive video game: you only get it once you've invested a lot of time and effort into it. It's the exact same as with any eSport, right down to player rankings (fun fact: Elo, a system many eSports base their MMR systems off of, was created specifically for chess).
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