Ace-High Straight

THE CINCINNATI KID by Richard Jessup. 154 pages. Little, Brown. $3.95.

This book has its faults, but none that couldn't be straightened out by Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. The story is to poker what The Hustler was to pool.

The Newman figure is the Cincinnati Kid--still in his 20s but already "a three-river rambling-gambling man," acknowledged among card men from "the East River" (the Ohio) to "the West River" (the Missouri) and all up and down The River from St. Louis to "Noorlins." He sits down with the nationally established five-card champion and tries to replace him as The Man.

Author Richard Jessup, a former merchant seaman from Savannah who once worked as a dealer in a gambling joint in Harlem, tells a cool, good story. His language is as spare as the language of the men he is writing about, but his work has the topography a novel needs.

One of Jessup's real achievements is the sense he gives of the fraternity among gambling men: they may be hustlers when they are playing with amateurs, but they are knights to one another.

When a man is broke, he takes Tap City--a handout from the other players in the game. It is living-expense money to get restarted on, all of which must be paid back before the loser can sit down with his fellow pros again.

The poker itself has a nice ring of language. "The raiser came back with a touch, a breath, feeling his way into those checking queens like a man fumbling in the dark." But ultimately the technical side of the novel turns on a confrontation of hands that are bet with a foolishness that belies the experience claimed for the players. Against a pair of tens showing, the Kid's opponent matches a $2,000 bet after three cards on the strength of a possible flush. Win or lose, anyone called The Man ought to be called The Boy for doing that.

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