In Double or Nothing, Tom Breitling describes his exciting journey from being a nobody to becoming the owner of one of Las Vegas’ legendary casinos, all thanks to some daring business ventures, a strong friendship and a little luck. Intern Seth Fiegerman interviewed the author:

PLAYBOY: So much of your story deals with taking risks in business. How do you judge when it's appropriate to take a major risk?
BREITLING: Most people are not only afraid to fail, but they are afraid to succeed.  In the casino business, we say that most people are not only afraid to lose, they are afraid to win. When it comes to business, gut instinct is a big part of pulling the trigger on a deal, but it also takes lots of due diligence, lots of analysis, and the risk taking needs to be well calculated.  This makes things a lot less risky.

Let me give you an example:  When we looked at buying the Golden Nugget, we decided to put everything on the line.  And the numbers told us that the timing was right in the market.  Gaming valuations were low, we liked the Golden Nugget, and we thought that it had tremendous upside, and we really wanted to be in the business – but we couldn’t overpay or it would be a bad deal.  People thought we were crazy to buy a casino in downtown Las Vegas because everything was focused on the Strip.  In our gut, we knew we could make it work downtown, so we worked with our bankers and calculated the right price that we could pay, negotiated that price, and then had to write the biggest check of our lives. We were not afraid to succeed.  

PLAYBOY: You made much of your money thanks to good timing and two great forces of the 90s: the DotCom boom and the Las Vegas hotel building boom. Do you think your story would be possible in this decade?
BREITLING: Definitely.  Just watch us.  I believe “the harder you work, the luckier you get”.  It takes a lot of hours to build any business, but the casino business is unusual in that in never closes – and it is hyper competitive.  Business takes a lot of work and you have to crash through a lot of walls to be successful, but when you love what you do, you care more and work harder.  Opportunities will always present themselves, but creative and imaginative minds will always have an opportunity in this global marketplace.  You can’t be afraid of hard work, and understand that timing is everything.  With a long term vision for a business, you can ride a boom or hit it big in many different ways.  Make sure to always ‘be a student’.  Learn everyday from your competitors, your customers, and the titans of industry and leaders of government.  Study the macro and micro economic trends of an industry, and focus on building great partnerships and creating the best teams possible to build a business.  

PLAYBOY: After you created a new business model that allowed people to make their hotel and vacation plans online quickly, and later sold it to Expedia for $105 million, you and Tim, your best friend and business partner, purchased a legendary Vegas casino. While this was a longtime dream of Tim's, you grew up wanting to be Bob Costas. Were you apprehensive about buying the casino?  Do you ever regret not becoming a sportscaster?
BREITLING: Tim and I had talked about getting into the hotel & casino business for a long time.  I remember back in 1993 when we were driving on the Las Vegas strip past Caesars Palace and he said to me, “One day we are going to own our own hotel/casino”!  I laughed at him and he looked at me like he was going to punch me in the mouth.  I knew at that moment that he was serious!  After we had sold our first business, we actually had the resources to buy our own hotel/casino.  In 2003, Tim asked me to come to his office and he said “I really want to buy a casino and I figured out how we can do it.  But I need $25 million”.  “$25 million from you, $25 million from me, we can borrow $175 million and we can do a $225 million deal.  Let’s do it”.  I began to think – “this is not that crazy of an idea”.  I always loved the quote “Every battle is won before it’s fought” from the Art of War.  Well, we had done our homework and the Golden Nugget was the perfect fit for us.  I was apprehensive about the amount of money for a few minutes, but that faded away quickly as our dream of becoming casino owners was about to become a reality.  As for regrets about becoming a sportscaster, I have none.  I love what I do and I work hard to do the best job possible.  While on tour for my book in San Diego, I was pulled onto the set by a fun meteorologist, Chrissy Russo, and we had fun doing the weather and traffic for a few minutes, but these days it would be more fun for me to own the TV station.

PLAYBOY: In the book, you describe another gambler's luck that nearly undermined your own. "Mr. Royalty," as you call him, is on an incredible winning streak that puts your casino, and everything you've worked for, in jeopardy. How did you deal with this?
BREITLING: There is an old saying in Las Vegas – the math is the math and in the end, the house will always come out on top.  We knew that no gambler could outlast the test of time, but I am also going to tell you that winning streaks do happen. The pace of casino life is fast, and this gambler went on a $25 million winning streak across the country, with more than $8.5 million won at our casino.  We wanted to continue to let him play, but the business aspect of the casino business means that you always want to have a bankroll and to know who your customers are and take care of those customers.  

PLAYBOY: You've also had some incredible celebrity mentors along the way – Tony Bennett, Steve Wynn and Andre Agassi, to name a few. What's it like to get advice from Tony Bennett? Is there one piece of advice they gave you that really sticks out?
BREITLING: Tony Bennett told me once at lunch that “Entrepreneurs are the artists of the future”.  It was a conversation that he had with Cary Grant one day and he passed it along to me.  I loved that quote for two reasons.  For one, it showed me that Tony had great respect for entrepreneurs – in fact, he and Cary Grant went so far as to call us artists much in the same way we think of them as artists – I couldn’t believe it!  One of the great artists of all time was calling me an artist.  It was a surreal lunch.  And it showed me Tony’s appreciation and level of respect he has for his son Danny, who managed his career.   Danny’s business savvy allows Tony to do what he does best, and that is to sing and to paint.  This experience also taught me a lot about business as art.  After Tony told me about entrepreneurs as artists, I look at business an entirely different way.  I look at every job as art and every employee as an artist.  I look at things with a new perspective, with depth and composition and ways to do things better.  If you look at your work as art, you do it better whether you are a dealer or a window washer or a front desk clerk at a hotel. If you can view your work as art (no matter what it is), it will give you an entirely new perspective.  We were fortunate to have two of the best artists in the world as our partners to show us this example, Andre Agassi and Tony Bennett.  But the mutual respect, and the view that business is art, lifted us to entirely new levels.  I learned a lot of lessons from Tony about class and hard work and persistence, and about the power and respect involved in partnerships, but the lesson of “entrepreneurs as artists” will remain with me forever.

PLAYBOY: Throughout it all, one constant was your best friend and partner Tim.  How important was your friendship to your success?
BREITLING: The power of our friendship and our partnership was and is the key to our success.  Our story is the real life Oceans 11, and it all started when I moved to Las Vegas back in 1993.  Picture this: I am a 24 year old from Minnesota driving from California to Las Vegas in my used Honda Accord with $100 in my pocket.  I’m driving there to join my best friend Tim Poster in a travel business where we didn’t have much of a plan.  We were just two young guys taking on the world.  12 years later, we had done 2 deals worth over $200 million and we did that through hard work and by building a partnership and friendship based on trust and loyalty.  Las Vegas is the land of opportunity, but it is also hyper competitive.  My best friend and I live by the philosophy of the Sinatra lyrics “If you can make it there you can make it anywhere”.  In addition, we all deal with partners in life, whether it is in business, marriage, or our social lives.  Having the right partners and friends allows us to make the most out of each and every day.  The biggest part of our story is about the experience of building successful partnerships.  Through our two business adventures, our friendship and our philosophy of building partnerships was the essential part of the journey.