It’s Vegas, there’s a high-stakes gamble in play, and the man at the helm is also a former World Series of Poker champion, so it’s predictable that he might put it all in perspective with some cheesy reference to cards or dice or slot machines.

But no. Bobby Baldwin prefers to view the game-changing $8.5 billion, 67-acre CityCenter complex that MGM Mirage is about to launch through the eyes of another of his many and varied hobbies.

Skeptics grouse that the gleaming cluster of high-rises that begin bowing today at the heart of the Las Vegas Strip are too forward thinking for middle-brow, recession-ravaged Vegas, what with the dream team of architects that designed it and the $40 million in public art that dots the campus and the 2,400 condominium units for sale even though the market has yet to prove anyone actually wants to live on the Strip.

Yet Baldwin, president of CityCenter and overlord of its five-year construction process, has been here before. He was Steve Wynn’s chief lieutenant as they opened the revolutionary Mirage in 1989 and the luxurious Bellagio in 1998, both of which were greeted first with hearty choruses from doomsayers.

And so Baldwin has come to believe that being ahead of the times is critical in Vegas. Which is where skeet shooting comes in.

“You always shoot above the clay pigeon or the bullet falls behind it,” explains the 58-year-old man with a plume of curly blond hair and a Southern twang that persists more than 30 years after he permanently fled his native Tulsa for the desert. “So it’s like CityCenter here. This was conceived five years ago, see, and it was set way out ahead of what then was known as the marketplace. Even if it’s out a little too far, the world will grow into it right away. The world is a moving target.”

The one constant here is, in fact, Baldwin, who threads Vegas history in a way few others have. He started out, after all, as one part of a cadre of professional poker players grinding out livings in the squalid, smoke-filled card rooms of Binion’s Horseshoe and the Golden Nugget in the 1970s before poker was hip. Baldwin had quit his parents’ Oklahoma home-construction business in the early 1970s because, ironically, he found the hassle of supervising construction irksome and dropped out of the University of Oklahoma because playing poker was more fun and lucrative. In 1978, he won the World Series of Poker and relocated his young family to Vegas.

Back then, a young casino operator named Wynn would sidle up to Baldwin chomping on Monte Cristo No. 1 cigars, chatting him up and losing a few thousand bucks here and there against him for the pleasure of his company.

“I always thought that Bobby was a very gifted guy who had a very advanced sense of intelligence that could reach beyond poker, that he had a sense about business,” Wynn recalls. “I kept trying to get him to work for me, but he’d say, ‘I’m 28 years old, I’m making a great living, I’m having fun.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s a narrow thing, doing one thing all the time.’”

There were many turning points in the progress from Old to New Vegas, but one of them is the day Wynn finally prevailed upon Baldwin, a gambler who arrived in the heyday of mobsters Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal and Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, to go corporate. In 1982, Baldwin became Wynn’s Golden Nugget poker room manager.

Still, Baldwin moved up in a decidedly Vegasy way, by canning his own boss. After a few months on the job, Baldwin had reserved a whole restaurant for a large group of high rollers from Texas celebrating a birthday, and when the Golden Nugget’s marketing chief demanded he and his wife be seated that night despite the important clientele, Baldwin replied, “I’ll tell ya what. You’re fired. And if you don’t like what I just said, go see Steve Wynn.”