How to Survive in Vegas

Gary Loveman, the chief executive officer of Harrah's Entertainment, the largest gaming corporation in the world, sees his customers as a set of probabilities wrapped in human flesh. First he considers the most basic set of probabilities, gender and age, since females are more regular gamblers than males and older women are the most lucrative demographic of all. Then he factors in where we live, what we do, how much we make, and, most important, how we wager and what we play when we come to one of his casinos. From those details, Loveman can divine to a remarkably accurate degree how much you, or the set of probabilities you represent, will be worth to Harrah's over the course of your lifetime. "I am purely empirical," says Loveman, sounding like the former Harvard Business School professor he is. "I am not attached to any romantic notion of how this business should be run. I am only driven where the evidence takes me."

Loveman is a unique figure in American business: an academic theoretician who made the transition to operating a multibillion dollar corporation. Uncommon career path aside, he's not much of a gambler. He sees the floor at Caesars Palace as his storefront, and the people at the craps and blackjack and roulette tables and at his beloved slot machines—those computerized boxes that pay out less than craps tables and gather so much more information—as the customers Harrah's must strive to please. The happier they are, the more pleasant their experience at one of Harrah's 52 casinos, then the more likely the set of probabilities embodied in each of them will continue to pay out for Loveman. When you look out at a casino floor, you see people playing blackjack or the slots; when Gary Loveman looks out at that floor, he sees his slots or his table games playing you.