The Cincinnati Kid and Looking Back

For a long while now I’ve had to moderate comments on the blog for the sole reason that if I do not the blog would be riddled with spammy attempts at free linkage. I know it adds an extra bit of hassle for those wishing to make comments, not to mention might, perhaps, dissuade some from going to the bother of commenting at all. But the alternative of going without any sort of moderation isn’t really an option.

I get email notifications whenever comments are made, and usually during the course of a week I’ll get several messages letting me know of “comments” awaiting moderation that are examples of such spam. People (or programs) still try, I guess, even though these comments never do make it onto the site. Just this morning I was notified that someone had “commented” on three older posts, with each of the comments representing identical, hyperlink-peddling gibberish. Then during the time it has taken me to write this post, the same commenter tried one more time on another nearly two-year-old post.

Usually if the comment is on an older post, especially from years ago, the odds of it being spam go up considerably. However, sometimes such comments turn out to be genuine responses, with readers sharing their thoughts after having found the posts via searches on topics that interest them, then overcoming both the comment moderation hurdle and the fact that the passage of time might have made it seem less apt to be offering some belated rejoinder to some long dormant discussion.

Last night came an example of such in the form of a long, thoughtful comment by a reader to a post of mine from more than six years ago (good gosh) about The Cincinnati Kid.

Way back in early 2007, I was inspired to write a series of four posts about The Cincinnati Kid. The posts covered not just the 1965 film, but also the DVD commentary and the Richard Jessup novel on which the film was based.

The posts were as follows:

Commentary on the Commentary: The Cincinnati Kid (1/5/07)

Richard Jessup’s The Cincinnati Kid (1/7/07)

Poker Review: The Cincinnati Kid (1/9/07)

The Last Hand of The Cincinnati Kid: Differences Between the Novel and the Film (1/11/07)

(Incidentally, I also wrote another Poker & Pop Culture piece for PokerNews some time ago discussing “Critical Reception of ‘The Cincinnati Kid.’”)

The first of those four 2007 posts addresses the two commentary tracks on the Warner Brothers DVD released in 2005. One is by Phil Gordon and Dave Foley, then co-hosts of Celebrity Poker Showdown (a blast from the past, eh?), and other is by director Norman Jewison. I conclude (unsurprisingly) that of the two, Jewison’s contribution is much more relevant and interesting.

The second post is a pretty thorough discussion of Jessup’s novel, which I still think is often too quickly dismissed as a pulpy throwaway. I tentatively talk about some of the differences between the novel and film (trying not to deliver any spoilers), and ultimately praise the book for its “hard-boiled” qualities and ability to present a few compelling characters. I do, however, conclude the film to be the greater achievement.

The third post then presents a proper review of the movie in which I express my admiration of several of the film’s elements, including the acting, the script, and the successful presentation of various themes. The review having gone on longer than I’d wished, I then decided to save a discussion of the final scene for a separate post.

That last post breaks down the big climactic hand of five-card stud played between Lancey Howard (“the Man”) and Eric, pointing out how the film actually changes some of the details of the hand from the way Jessup had presented it in the novel. In my discussion I defend the hand against the criticism many have lodged regarding its improbability, trying to fit it within the film’s attempt to communicate broader, “existential” ideas about life.

It was this last post that has earned a couple of interesting comments recently. One came a few months ago from a reader suggesting an idea I’ve heard others consider, namely, that cheating occurs in the hand, with Lady Fingers (the dealer) acting as an accomplice to Lancey.

Another comment was the one from last night by a reader wanting to take issue with my suggestion that “The Man” plays the final hand badly, then gets lucky. That comment provides an interesting justification for Lancey’s thinking in the hand (as shown in the film), explaining how it fits with an overall strategy put forth throughout the session to set up Eric for a huge loss.

I found both of these recent comments on a post written years ago quite enjoyable. After so many years, my thoughts about the film have necessarily evolved somewhat, especially now that I teach it regularly in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class. In fact, thanks mostly to the fact that every few months I’m rewatching it and discussing it with a new group of viewers, I’ve been inspired to write a couple more posts here about it, including one more focusing on that last hand:

Experience and The Cincinnati Kid (4/5/11)

Does the Kid Know Jack? (4/16/12)

Rereading that more recent post in which I again address the last hand, I realize it might partially support my reader’s comment about Lancey having successfully set up Eric for the big, final fall. In any case, I’ll let those who are interested to read more about the movie -- which I still rank as my favorite of all “poker films” -- follow these links and see what I’ve written as well as what my readers have had to say in response.

A major theme in The Cincinnati Kid is the difference between the young and old and the important lessons learned by experience. The characters’ names of “the Kid” and “the Man” point to such a theme in a conspicuous way, with Eric’s desire to “be the Man” obviously paralleling the kind of “growing up” everyone goes through.

Going back and rereading posts written years ago likewise brings to the fore the lessons of experience for your humble scribbler. I still feel connected to those early posts and am thus genuinely intrigued (and excited) by responses written to them. But I’ve also experienced much since I wrote them, with those experiences necessarily introducing some additional critical distance between my present and past selves.

Does the Kid Know Jack?

A long while ago I wrote a series of posts about The Cincinnati Kid -- both the 1965 film and the Richard Jessup novel. In one of those posts I talked at length about the final hand in the climactic, heads-up match between Lancey Howard (a.k.a. “The Man”) and Eric (“the Kid”).

I was rewatching the film recently and noticed another clever bit of foreshadowing that I thought I’d point out today. If you’ve never seen the film, this post won’t be so interesting as I’m going write with an assumption that you have. Also, even though we are nearly 50 years down the line here, I might as well say “spoiler alert” to those who still plan on seeing The Cincinnati Kid and don’t want to know how it ends.

Okay, so for those of us who’ve seen the movie... we all remember the last hand, right? The game is five-card stud. The Man (Edward G. Robinson) turns over the , showing that he has a straight flush, beating the full house of Eric (Steve McQueen) to bust him. You might not remember another, earlier hand, though, that bears a kind of interesting relationship to the last one.

Recall how the game begins with six players -- Eric, Lancey, Shooter, Doc Sokal, Pig, and Yeller -- before eventually all drop out to leave Eric and the Man to play heads-up. When they are still six-handed, a big hand develops between Lancey and Pig in which Lancey wins most of Pig’s money, then Pig beats a retreat.

In that earlier hand, Lancey (Edward G. Robinson) is showing a pair of jacks on third street and bets, and Doc Sokal calls. Then Pig raises with Q-7 showing. Both Lancey and Doc call. Fourth street is dealt -- apparent blanks to all three -- and this time Pig boldly bets the pot -- $980. Lancey calls him, and after making his calculations Doc calls too, chasing both a straight and a flush.

Fifth street is then dealt. Doc has missed both of his draws and he essentially bows out of the hand out of turn. Pig is showing Q-7-7-9, while Lancey shows J-J-10-3. Pig bets $1,500, then Lancey calmly raises to $4,000. Pig only has $1,100 left, and Lancey agrees to reduce his raise to that amount.

After fretting a bit, a highly agitated Pig decides to fold his hand. He then lurches across the table to get a look at Lancey’s hole card, but he’s stopped by the others. Pig then storms out with a great deal of petulance.

“Not very lucky, is he?” says Lancey with a deadpan look.

It’s hard to know exactly what the players had. Pig could have had a queen in the hole for queens and sevens and folded out of fear that Lancey had a third jack as his down card. Seems more likely, though, that Pig was trying to bluff Lancey out of the hand, his boldness on third and fourth in the face of Lancey’s pair of jacks part of a story he was trying to build about having a queen underneath. Thus he had no choice but to fold his worse hand at the end and save his last $1,100.

It doesn’t matter too much what the players had, though. In the end, Lancey had either a better hand -- or more nerve -- and thus broke Pig’s resolve.

After the hand comes that neat, short scene in which Lancey and Kid have a short talk. Among the topics they discuss is the hand with Pig that had just concluded.

“You know, that was a sweet thing you did to the Pig with those jacks,” says Eric. “You saw that coming, did you?” says Lancey. “Yeah, I saw it coming,” answers the Kid. “Before I raised?” asks Lancey. “I saw it coming, Lancey,” Eric confirms.

Like I say, we don’t know precisely what Lancey had in the hole, although Eric here speaks self-assuredly as though he did. Either Eric is saying he knew Lancey had trip jacks and was sandbagging, or -- more likely, I think -- he’s saying he knew Lancey didn’t have the jack and set up a fifth-street bluff that he knew Pig couldn’t call.

In either case, Eric is here confidently telling the Man that he knew for certain what Lancey had as his down card. And the only real issue regarding that hole card was whether or not it was a jack.

Notice how this relates to the final hand of the film? Recall all the spectators murmuring to each other when Lancey surprisingly reraises Eric on fifth street.

“My God, he’s got the jack,” says Slade. “He couldn’t have the jack!” says Shooter. “He hasn’t got the jack, the Kid’s got him,” he adds.

Alas for Eric, the Man does have the jack. Of course, it’s the one jack he needed here -- the -- to complete his straight flush. Nonetheless, the situation kind of echoes that earlier hand in which the Kid so boldly declared he knew what the Man had.

Being Human

Victoria Coren wrote a neat, short Guardian piece yesterday titled “How do you find the best player in the world?”

There she reflects briefly on the recent International Federation of Poker event in which teams from 11 nations (plus a team from the “virtual” nation of Zynga) completed against one another using the duplicate poker format. I wrote a little about the IFP event, though not so much about duplicate poker, in my Community Cards column for Epic Poker this week, “Poker as a Sport.”

Coren’s succinctly-made point yesterday was to point out how difficult -- really, impossible -- it is to rank poker players according to any utterly unambiguous scale. “I rather like the impossibility of naming anyone ‘best,’” writes Coren, adding that “the ensuing, unceasing argument is so human.”

I rather like Coren’s choice of adjective to conclude that thought. It is “human” to attempt such futile tasks. And it’s our being “human” that helps contribute to the impossibility of objectively ranking poker players.

She ends her column with a quote from the last page of Richard Jessup’s novel The Cincinnati Kid, a book I wrote about here some years ago. The quote is in fact presented in the novel as an idea Christian (Eric’s girlfriend) tries to impart to the Kid. “For every number one man there is a number two man,” goes the idea, “and because of this a man cannot retreat from life.”

Then comes a pronouncement about the seemingly unbeatable Lancey Howard: “The difference is that the number one man is a machine and the Cincinnati Kid is not, and was not, and never will be a machine.”

The implication that Lancey is “a machine” sounds an ironic note when we recall his nickname -- “The Man.” Another implication, of course, is that being human means being capable of losing. That no “number one” can ever continue as such without being challenged. Not if he’s human, that is.

All of that talk resonated strongly with me today as we just happen to be reading and discussing “poker bots” and online poker in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class. Our readings consider recent efforts in artificial intelligence to create poker-playing computer programs -- i.e., to make machines more human-like -- as well as how online poker might have the effect of making humans more machine-like.

All of these items -- artificial intelligence, poker bots, online poker, the fictional character Lancey Howard -- encourage us to consider the significance of the human element in poker. And how it is our flaws and our efforts to exploit those of others and suppress our own that make the game interesting and meaningful -- not a “retreat from life,” but an expression of it.

Experience and The Cincinnati Kid

We are now starting to watch and discuss films in earnest in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class. I’ve been showing clips from various poker-themed movies all semester, although we are only watching three in their entirety -- The Cincinnati Kid (1965), California Split (1974), and Rounders (1998).

Yesterday we had a good discussion of The Cincinnati Kid, a film I don’t believe any in the class had ever seen before. Reviews from the students were quite positive. A lot of us -- both young and old -- don’t tend to watch too many films from 40-plus years ago. Thus when we do, and when the film happens to be a good one, there’s often this kind of pleasant surprise that occurs. At least that’s what I’ve noticed whenever I’ve introduced an older film to a group of students like this.

I don’t think the students were necessarily expecting a film as absorbing as The Cincinnati Kid, despite my advertising it as a great story with a well-constructed plot, especially good acting (and casting), and a smart use of poker to explore various themes. But they liked it, and had some smart things to say about it, too.

One theme we talked about a lot in class was the obvious “innocence vs. experience” one that gets played out in various ways in the movie, most notably in the big heads-up confrontation between “the Kid” (Eric Stoner, played by Steve McQueen) and “the Man” (Lancey Howard, played by Edward G. Robinson).

Speaking of innocence and experience, a while back I wrote a series of posts here about The Cincinnati Kid in which I discussed Richard Jessup's novel, the film, the DVD commentary, and the last hand (in both the novel and film). Looking back on those posts today I see a few good points being made, though I realize how I might well have focused on different aspects of the story and its messages had I written those posts today.

One observation that came up in our class discussion is how during the course of the film the Kid seems always to win. In other words, as solid and steady as the Kid is when compared to most other players, he perhaps lacks the experience of having had to deal with loss (the subject of yesterday’s post, actually).

We don’t see the Man lose much, either, although during the final sequence he does endure a bit of a downswing. Still, from the way he talks about the game and his having played all over the country for 35 years, it’s clear he’s likely been forced to deal with his share of losing along the way. Such experience enables him to arrive at an understanding that, for instance, “money is never an end in itself... it’s simply a tool, as language is to thought.” And how even the best players will find themselves “making the wrong move at the right time” sometimes.

I didn’t focus on the Kid’s lack of experience with losing in those posts from before. But having revisited the film this week, I’m realizing it’s not only a crucial part of his character, but helps clarify a larger message of the film, too, not to mention perhaps bearing relevance to the way that final hand goes, too.

Not going to spell all that out here today, though. Go watch (or rewatch) the film yourself and decide what you think.