At the end of the first edition of Whale Hunt in the Desert, we last saw Steve Cyr working at the Golden Nugget for young entrepreneurs Tim Poster and Tom Breitling. Tim and Tom, however, owned the joint for a little less than two years. In March 2005, they cut a deal to sell the Nugget to Landry’s, the chain-restaurant company. The sale closed that November for $295 million; Tim and Tom cleared a cool $80 million.
From the Golden Nugget, Cyr migrated across town to the casino for which he’s perhaps been destined to rep lo these many years.
Steve Cyr has always been a Hard Rock kind of guy.
He’s hung out there since it opened, just down the street from the Hilton, in 1995. He took his Hilton players to party there when it was taboo to host them at a competing property. And that’s where he met his girlfriend-turned-wife Tanya, when she was a bartender at the Pink Taco there.
He’s still an independent rep, not a salaried employee, but he has an office at the Hard Rock, where he’s one of the older hosts and is very much involved in promoting their new poker room. He’s training the younger player reps, coaching them on the finer points of interpreting Central Credit files, establishing networks of informants, and, of course, telemarketing. But he’s learning new tricks from them as well, such as how to navigate the sophisticated database-marketing and player-tracking software that the Hard Rock uses.
And, of course, he’s still up to his old tricks. One night he heard from a mole that a million-dollar player was firing it up at a blackjack table in the Rio’s high-limit pit. Even though he’d never met the player before and didn’t know what he looked like, he ran over to the Rio in a Hard Rock limo with another host, who went in and called out the player’s name. The player turned around and identified himself, and as the pit boss was having a few words with the other host, Cyr convinced his new best friend to pick up his chips, hop in the limo, and switch to the Hard Rock.
He also lectures to psychology-of-gaming classes at University of Nevada-Las Vegas and marketing classes at the hotel administration schools at the University of Southern Mississippi and Cornell.
You can stay up-to-date on Steve and Tanya Cyr, who's now Director of Marketing at Rick's Cabaret, the new gentlemen's club that was formerly Scores, and their hosting company H-Six, at stevecyr.com.
