Bobby Baldwin

Cards and gambling run rich through Bobby Baldwin’s life. The 2003 inductee to the Poker Hall of Fame began playing the game when he was 12 years old and now, almost half a decade later, he is the president and the CEO of Las Vegas’ Mirage Casino.

Baldwin has four World Series of Poker bracelets in his resume, all collected in three years from 1977 to ’79, however, his introduction to poker was not a smooth one.

Growing up in an upper-middle-class society, Baldwin played his first competitive hands in 1963 and was thoroughly beaten.

Despite losing, the rush he felt as he played urged him to continue and in his sophomore year at Oklahoma State University, a 19-year-old Baldwin went to Vegas with his friends. He lost his initial $5000 bankroll but managed to get an extra $500 in credit. Almost immediately he was down to $75 but by the end of the night he had worked his way up to $38,000. By the end of the trip he had made $180,000.

He invested some in stocks, he played in card halls, he returned to Vegas and he bet on football games. Within three months he had lost it all but undeterred he felt his future lay in gambling.

His bad luck was not exclusive to money. Around this time he married his childhood sweetheart but within a year they had split up.

However, things soon began to look up for Baldwin. He met a new woman, Shirley, and his bank balance soon changed for the better. One disastrous weekend betting on football – losing around 80% of his bankroll on five games – put an end to this activity and he focused solely on poker.

His first bracelet came in 1977 in the Seven Card Stud and in the same year he won the Deuce to Seven Draw. He won the latter event again two years later but it was his success in the 1978 No Limit Hold ‘em that put him in the record books. Aged 23, Baldwin took home $210,000 and became the youngest player to ever win the main event. In 1980, Stu Ungar took that record from him and held it for almost a decade.

At 26, as a testament to his skill, Baldwin was asked to write the Limit Hold ‘em section for Doyle Brunson’s Super System book.

Rather than turn pro, as he so easily could have done, Baldwin went into management but remained in the gambling industry. In ’82 he became a consultant at the Golden Nugget casino before becoming president in 1984. Later that decade he was in charge of The Mirage and a decade on he took control of the Bellagio.

In 1999 he worked for Mirage Resorts under Steve Wynn and after a merger of Mirage Resorts and MGM Grand in 2000 Baldwin became CEO of The Mirage Resorts.

When the movie Ocean’s Eleven was being remade, Baldwin was key in getting many of the locations available for filming.

In 1996, Baldwin’s wife passed away. He has since remarried and lives with his new wife, Donna, and his son from his previous marriage in Las Vegas. Although no longer a tournament participant, Baldwin occasionally still plays in high stake games with some of the game’s top players.