Winner Takes All

An unprecedented up-close-and-personal look at the trio of tycoons whose high-stakes gambles---in business---make Sin City soar.

Steve Wynn. Kirk Kerkorian. Dr. Gary Loveman. The first two are world-famous for their flamboyant, often outrageous efforts to dominate Las Vegas. But it's the third---an economist from Harvard Business School, unknown even to most of the guests at his high-profile casinos---who may now have the most impact. In Winner Takes All, Christina Binkley, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, explores how these three magnates are building a bigger and better Las Vegas and how their influence is spreading beyond the city's borders.

Meet the winners:

---Steve Wynn is the visionary behind the Mirage, the Bellagio, and the $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas. Loud and passionate, with a tragic backstory---a world-renowned art collector, he is slowly going blind from retinitis pigmentosa---Wynn is often called the architect of modern Las Vegas.

---Kirk Kerkorian, who is in his late eighties, is a shy, sly tactician, but his status as a billionaire deal maker who owns half the strip---and his history as nemesis to Howard Hughes---keeps him in the forefront of Las Vegas, wheeling and dealing.

---Dr. Gary Loveman, the CEO of Harrah's Entertainment, Inc., represents a new, more populist future for Las Vegas, one in which gamblers will be carefully culled from databases rather than lured by flash. Loveman approaches the city as though it were a Harvard case study. On the verge of becoming Las Vegas's---and possibly the world's---biggest gambling titan, he refuses to even live there.