Whales are not only the world's largest creatures. They're also the world's largest gamblers.

The world's largest gambling whales can make $50,000-$250,000 (US) bets—not cumulatively over a trip, but on every hand, hour after hour, day after day. A whale's wins and losses can top out at $20 million to $30 million during a typical Las Vegas weekend. This can and does impact a huge publicly traded casino corporation's entire quarterly earnings.

Of course, whales don't just swim up to a casino with the tide. With only a handful of them in the world, they're actively hunted by casino marketing executives, also known as hosts. WHALE HUNT IN THE DESERT is the story of one such host, Steve Cyr.

The book delves deeply into the whale hunt — covering the history of the handling of high rollers in Las Vegas—mostly through the saga of this superhost: where he came from; how he employs casino perks such as limos, penthouses, shopping sprees, trips abroad, show-up money, and sex (yes, sex) to hook the big fish.

Synopsis

In pre-1990s Las Vegas, casino marketing executives were all cut from the same cloth; sharply-dressed and smooth-talking with street-savvy. They rose through the ranks of operations - dealer, floor-man, pit boss, shift boss and casino manager. When it was time to leave the trenches, they went "upstairs" into the executive offices, where they hosted a handful of established players according to the unwritten rules of old-school Vegas. Then Steve Cyr showed up...

About the Author

Author Deke Castleman has been in the gambling-media business for more than 15 years and the travel-publishing business for 25. He's written numerous editions of Las Vegas and Nevada travel guides and, as senior editor of Las Vegas-based Huntington Press, he's edited upwards of 40 books on gambling and co-written more than 150 issues of Las Vegas' most respected travel and gambling newsletter, LasVegasAdvisor.com. This is his expose' of the final undocumented frontier of the corporate-casino era: gambling's whales.