A Look At The Las Vegas Casino Moguls: Wynn: Kerkorian: Loveman

Title: Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, And The Race To Own Las Vegas

Author: Christina Binkley

ISBN: 978-1-4013-0236-8

Publisher: Hyperion

Every year millions of people are lured to the playgrounds of Las Vegas and as well-known casino developer Steve Wynn quipped, "they´re coming here to play and that is what Las Vegas is all about. It´s a playpen."

In Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, And The Race To Own Las Vegas journalist, Christina Binkley, who spent ten years covering Las Vegas for the Wall Street Journal brings to life three of Las Vegas most famous king pins of casino development and tells how they started and what distinguishes one from the other.

We learn about Steve Wynn who began his business career running the family´s bingo operation after his father died. As a result of his initial success, he was able to save up enough money to purchase a small interest in the New Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas where he and his wife Elaine moved in 1967. From this time onwards he never looked back and after a successful land deal in 1971 involving Howard Hughes and Caesars Palace, he was able to secure a controlling interest in the famous Golden Nugget Las Vegas. It was here where he began to use his enormous creative talents in renovating, revamping and expanding the Golden Nugget from a mere gambling hall to a resort hotel and casino with tremendous success. And in the process he was successful in attracting a new upscale clientele to downtown Las Vegas. This was only the beginning of his subsequent acquisitions involving various other casinos as the lavish and luxurious Mirage with its indoor forest and out door volcano, Treasure Island Hotel and Casino, Bellagio with its opulence which cost over a billion dollars to construct and which even attracted high-end boutiques, restaurants and a museum-quality art gallery. Eventually, Wynn sold his Mirage Resorts to Kirk Kerkorian who controlled MGM Grand Inc and with the monies earned he made a come back with Wynn Las Vegas. What is remarkable about Wynn, as Binkley points out, is that his timing was uncanny for after he bought the Desert Inn, Las Vegas began to share off its reputation as a nursing home for failed acting and singing careers, cheesy hotels, and bad food.

Kirk Kerkorian is another kind of a casino business developer who as Wynn once stated, and as mentioned in the book, "Kerkorian never breaks a sweat… all those deals he´s done-and he never sets foot in the building. He never misses a tennis game. He just likes bigger. He measures the cost of construction and the rate of inflation."

It was in 1944 when Kerkorian first flew into Las Vegas as a Cessna pilot and in 1962 he returned to purchase land across the Flamingo that eventually led to the building of Caesars Palace that leased the land from him. Eventually the land was sold to Casesars and Kerkorian wound up with a pile of money as a result of the years of rental and the proceeds from the sale. In the ensuing years he built the International Hotel Las Vegas and he bought the Flamingo, which he later sold to the Hilton. In 1973 Kerkorian purchased the famous movie studio, MGM and this in turn led to the opening of the original MGM Grand Hotel and Casino. One of the biggest ventures for Kerkorian was when he bought out Steve Wynn´s casinos and other goodies such as his fantastic art collection. And what really led to Kerkorian eventually owning half of the business on the strip was his acquisition of Mandalay Bay Resort. Hal Rothman, a University of Nevada Las Vegas professor described Kerkorian as a master strategist who sees the industry clearly. He calculates his opportunities and pounces."

Dr. Gary Loveman, CEO of Harrah´s Entertainment, is a much different breed of casino developer than Wynn and Kerkorian. His business experience includes a stint at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and as a professor at the Harvard Business School. He has a Ph.D from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Binkley hits the nail on the head when she asserts that Wynn and Kerkorian were selling products they loved to consume themselves while Loveman was selling something foreign to him, based solely on wits. Loveman with the assistance of his brainy associates, who he recruited, figured out all kinds of ways to keep even the losers coming back for more punishment. When he noticed how losers were miserable, he figured out how he could keep them gambling longer by reducing their perception of losing.

As mentioned on the front flap of the book, although all three of these moguls may be different in their approaches they all were vying for the same thing, to conquer the city that feeds the world´s fantasies.

As a result, Las Vegas is no longer a city for only gambling but it is also one filled with top notch restaurants, unbelievable lavish hotels that cost billions, first class entertainment attracting some of the biggest stars, even art galleries featuring some of the world´s most valuable art and much more.

No doubt all of this makes for some very interesting reading, however, I do have one complaint and that is that there is a lack of smooth transition between chapters. Very often they don´t cohere leading to a disjointed quality. Perhaps, this is due to Binkley´s background as a journalist and not as an author of a business books. At times it even felt that Binkley was in a hurry to jot down all of the information she had gathered during the ten years she spent on the strip gathering information for her newspaper column. Nonetheless, for those of you who want to learn more about the Las Vegas scene, this is an excellent starter.

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