Bill Hook made Bobby Fischer cry.

“I beat him about four times,” Hook says. “He cried when he lost.”

’Course, when Hook says he routinely whupped on and brought out the crybaby in the person who would later go on to become the greatest chess player in U.S. history (and probably in just plain history), Fischer was only 12 years old. And the games came during speed chess, a quickie variation of the western world’s oldest board game.

But, still. That’s a nice claim to chess fame.

Hook recounts his triumphs over Fischer at New York’s top chess hangouts, plus the night he drove the boy wonder home from a tournament when he was too young to drive, in Hooked on Chess, a memoir about his lifelong relationships with the game and those folks similarly devoted to it.

Hook’s book, released last year, also includes a passage about the night his win streak against young Bobby from Brooklyn was snapped, which happens to be the night Hook realized that the teary kid’s talent would eventually outgrow their club. For that segment of the population as fixated on queens and rooks as Hook has been for most of his 84 years, the paragraph reads like a romance novel.... Continued