Go-As-You-Please

Archeologists say that Egyptian kings played checkers 3,500 years ago. The earliest modern book on the game was written by one Torquemada in 1547. Neither the Rameses nor Torquemada was much concerned over the checker problems of the dub, but the latest book on checkers is. Published this week, How to Play Winning Checkers (Simon & Schuster; $1.50) is authored by an expert with the encouraging name of Hopper.

Millard Fillmore Hopper learned his first checkers in a Greenwich Village recreation centre while his friend from around the block, Gene Tunney, was learning to box. Big Gene Tunney retired as heavyweight champion of the world in 1928. Featherweight Millard Hopper, at 43, is still going strong as unrestricted ("go-as-you-please"*) checker champion of the U. S. Last summer at the New York World's Fair he set up a booth, took on all comers, sometimes a dozen at a time, played some 5,000 games, lost three.

Millard Hopper became champion by 1) studying with Christy Mathewson, as slick a checker player as he was a pitcher, 2) running a checker booth at Coney Island and manning the Eden Musee automaton, 3) beating Alfred Jordan, go-as-you-please champion of Great Britain.

Champion Hopper's book contains, in addition to lucid dope on openings, cross-board tactics, traps and end-game maneuvers, a chapter illustrating ten games in which experts lambaste dubs. Sympathetic post-mortems diagnose, slip by slip, just where the dubs let the experts bring on the two, three, and four-for-one Blitzkriegs that usually wind up such games. The particular Blitzkrieg Champion Hopper is scheming in the cut above is a six-for-two "in-and-out" shot.

* Go-as-you-please is the common or cornerstore variety of checkers, as distinguished from special tournament classes in which the first two or three moves are determined in advance. Two-move and three-move champion: Asa Long of Toledo.

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