“Bobby comes upstairs and says he’d just fired the marketing vice president,” Wynn says. “I said, ‘You did?’ And he says, ‘I did.’ And I said, ‘You know what this means?’ And he says, ‘Yeah. I’m now the vice president of marketing.’”

Baldwin went on to be Golden Nugget president and head of development of the Mirage, which opened in 1989 and sparked a two-decade building boom culminating with CityCenter. (For more on the $8.5 billion project, click here.)

One of Baldwin’s great skills, which he learned at the poker table and applied in business, is his ability to read people and project an eerie Zen. That calm counterbalanced the tempestuous Wynn in their pivotal collaboration. Rather than confront Wynn when they disagreed, Baldwin would let Wynn vent and return to him later with a counterargument.

“Bobby knew how to handle me, and I’m happy to say vice versa,” Wynn says. Baldwin’s version: “Steve was, of course, the big-picture guy and the visionary of the company. My job was to decide what the menu would be like, how much we were going to charge for this or that, how many six-top tables, four-top tables, deuces, and so on. All the details associated with the business over the 18 years I worked for Steve was mine.”

In 2000, when MGM Grand Inc. bought Mirage Resorts from Wynn, Baldwin stayed at majority shareholder Kirk Kerkorian’s request with the newly formed MGM Mirage as the CEO of Mirage Resorts. Wynn says he told Kerkorian to give Baldwin the reins over the entire company, but that would’ve meant shuffling aside Terry Lanni, who would remain CEO until 2008. Baldwin says he stayed largely because he wanted to operate the enterprises he’d built with Wynn, namely the Mirage and Bellagio, and that he felt an obligation to their employees.

In the book Winner Takes All by former Wall Street Journal gaming scribe Christina Binkley, Binkley writes at length of internal rivalries that ensued as Baldwin managed the Mirage assets, John Redmond managed the hotels already held, Murren positioned himself for the top post, and Lanni presided over it all. Baldwin now insists he never wanted to be CEO and that he wasn’t “well suited” for it, but Wynn believes Kerkorian made a grave mistake.

“They kept that structure of the so-called front man, the whipped-cream-and-cherry guy, the guy with the suit and the tie up there who is basically a hood ornament,” Wynn says. “Oh, yeah, they would’ve been much better off with Baldwin. Much better. Baldwin had the connection with the employees. Jim Murren is probably one of the best strategists, I have tremendous respect for the way he handled some of these deals, but he admits that he’s not an operator. And the boss has to be an operator in order to have a feel for the big decisions in the inside that affects the staff. It’s about customer experience, it’s not about financial experience.”

Wynn even tried to poach Baldwin in 2002 as he geared up to build the Wynn Las Vegas that opened in 2005 and had landed one of two American-held licenses to build resorts in Macau, China.

“I’m having a great time, they don’t interfere with me, and everything’s going well over here,” Wynn recalls Baldwin saying. “I opened two or three of these places for you, and I know how hard it is, how many hours of work. I don’t want to work that hard.”

Of course, he would end up working “that hard” and even more so. And yet now that CityCenter is on the brink of opening, it’s Baldwin who reassures Murren and Kerkorian that it’ll work out, just as Wynn says he calmed his jitters the days before Mirage’s bow. In doing so, Baldwin deploys another analogy from his collection of hobbies: off-road truck racing.

“You can’t be a truck racer without going over the edge sometimes, because you can’t find the edge until you’ve gone over it,” he says. Could CityCenter be over that edge? “Well we’re going to find out about that. It is edgy. It is out on the edge, that’s for sure.”