The Cincinnati Kid

The Cincinnati Kid, first published in 1963 (and made into a feature film starring Steve McQueen in 1965), is a gritty novel of smoky back-rooms and centered on a young card-shark (“The Kid”) who eventually finds himself in a stud-poker game against the undisputed master (“The Man”). From the dust-jacket: “By the time he was twenty-one, he was a full rambling-gambling man, a three river man... . From Jolly’s Omaha Card Club on the Missouri, to Sprügi’s Emporium in Wheeling on the Ohio, down to Memphis on the Mississippi, he was known as The Cincinnati Kid, a comer, with a way about him.”

The Kid first saw Lancey Hodges in a game in Kentucky, and he did not have to be told that Lancey was The Man, the number one player who ruled the stud poker circuit from Vegas to Miami. An old pro warned him about Lancey: “You growd some, Cincinnata. You kin make his stomik ulcer bleed, but I ain’t got much faith in nothin’ that will take him.”