Question of the Day - 12 October 2024

Of all the jobs in the casino, the host, or player development representative, is one of the most coveted and hardest to get. Also, there's no one route to landing the job. If you asked 50 hosts how they got to where they are, we doubt three of them came up along the same path.

In the old days, as described extensively in our book Whale Hunt in the Desert, hosts almost exclusively worked their way up through the ranks in the casino -- dealer, floorman, pit boss, perhaps even shift supervisor, until there was no more room for advancement. After 20 or 30 years in operations, they'd take their "book," or list of contacts of the casino's best players, with them when they were "kicked upstairs," then host the players when they came to town. It was definitely an old-boy's network, based almost entirely on juice -- the confidential relationships, the private deals.

One path to casino hosthood remains the same, working up through the ranks. Although these days, it's not necessarily in the casino. Sure, dealers turned floormen turned supervisors might still develop a book and parlay that into a host job. But many hosts start out in entry-level positions in casinos, such as guest services or front desk, the players club front desk or back-of-the-house positions, the slot and credit departments, and of course VIP services, the specific department that caters to high rollers who know and need hosts and expect to be hosted.

We know of a limo driver who became a host; he had a book of high-roller clients. We've heard of a VIP room cocktail waitress who became a host. We know a guy who knows a guy who became a host because he was fluent in Japanese; he was hired specifically to deal with whales from Nippon. 

Wherever they come from, as they work their way toward their goal, prospective hosts should understand everything there is to know about the role: providing complimentary services (hotel rooms, meals, transportation, event tickets) to loyal players; engaging in direct customer service and resolving player issues, no matter how trivial; building personal relationships with players, which includes new business, often through cold calls, comp dangling, special promotions, holiday parties, and the like; analyzing Central Credit reports and handling credit transactions; learning how casinos calculate a player’s worth, mostly based on expected value; familiarizing themselves with the customer-relationship systems and software; and more. 

Attending to these details is easier and more expedient from the inside, but the other path to hosthood is other kinds of service and sales experience. Selling casino gambling isn't all that different than selling computers, cars, condos, or Kirby vacuum cleaners. We've heard a number of stories in which a casino host goes to buy a car or a house, bumps into a super salesperson, and recruits him or her to become a host (the opposite is also true, wherein the car salesman recruits the host to work at the dealership). With customer service such a big part of the job, prior experience in the service industry (hotels, restaurants, retail) is very helpful. 

Then there's the other path, as suggested in the question: higher education. 

Many colleges and universities these days offer casino-management courses, even degrees; their hospitality schools (and online platforms) furnish training specific to the casino industry. And some casino companies recruit the top students into host trainee programs, which are an entry point for those without direct casino experience.

Steve Cyr, the superhost subject of Whale Hunt, was among the new guard of player rep who entered the casino industry out of college (in the 1980s). He went to UNLV, took all the gambling-related classes he could; in those days, that involved casino management, marketing, and mathematics. In his senior year, he did an internship at the Barbary Coast (now Cromwell) and when he graduated with a degree in hotel administration, he got a full-time job there and began working his way up through the ranks.

Cyr turned out to be a combination of the old and new schools of player development. First he got his degree, then navigated the maze into a host's job. These days, at age 60 after nearly 40 years in the business, he lectures to undergrads in the hotel-admin departments at UNLV and Cornell. These are hospitality- and gaming-management, marketing, public relations and communications, and even psychology majors looking to emulate the Cyrs of the world (Whale Hunt, of course, is required reading). He likes to talk to "the kids," as he calls them; he tells us, "I can get to them early. If some of them want to go into casino marketing, at least they'll know something about how it all really works."

Cyr has also helped run a program at the business school at New York University. This is a different deal entirely, with grad students in the MBA program. These prospects actually spend a week in Las Vegas, getting a direct, inside, and eye-opening look at how a superhost operates in real time. 

In the end, it's like anything in life. If you want to find something, you go looking for it. There are any number of ways of taking a journey to a destination. If you want to get there badly enough, you focus all your attention on achieving your goal. You study, you learn, you network, you put yourself in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. And eventually, you arrive.