Make Me Even

“A rip-roaring yarn of baseball, poker, and Wall Street told with humor and humanity, and a loving rendering of Wharton in the seventies.” —Geoffrey Garrett, dean, The Wharton School Rogers Stout has the gambler’s gifts: a titanic brain, an uncanny ability to read people, and a risk-taker’s daring. As an apathetic high school student who loves baseball but lacks a ninety-miles-per-hour fastball, he knows that the game does not begin until the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. But his life needs direction. Everything changes the summer Roger is invited into the boisterous environment of an investment bank’s trading room—and to a gambling hall dive where he immediately wins big at poker, capturing the attention of his coworkers with his card-playing skills. Intrigued by trading markets, Rogers’s intellectual curiosity takes him to Wharton and then to Wall Street, facing challenges as an outsider who thinks and acts differently from the white-shoe establishment. As Rogers plays his career hand, life plays another. Should he follow the temptress Elsbeth and her ravishing beauty or Charlotte, his high-spirited first love? An intriguing look at human aspiration and the interplay of honor, greed, fear, and individuality, Make Me Even and I’ll Never Gamble Again reveals a time when a new generation upended the status quo on Wall Street and forever changed investing. “By turns hilarious, insightful, and touching, Fine has written a coming-of-age story for the ages.” —Peter Lattman, vice chairman, The Atlantic “[An] absorbing story of an aspiring Wall Street trader.” —Kirkus Reviews