Billy Ray could star in a movie about his own life, and it would be a pretty good movie at that. Originally from England, he had come to Monte-Carlo as a young man to be a professional baccarat player. His specialty had been the version of baccarat known as banque a deux tables. In this game the player who holds the “bank” is actually dealing to two tables of “players” simultaneously. To be successful one has to constantly be calculating the odds of winning x amount at one table against losing y amount at the other.

A true professional, Billy Ray had played not with his own money but for various backers who would “invest” in his talents. In return he received his living expenses plus a point or two of the profits. He was a consistent winner, in his best year earning his backers 50 million dollars and himself a million or two. Now in his 60s, he had recently held a management position with a French casino resort group. Now he was with the Casino de Monte-Carlo and working directly with high rollers.

How does Monte-Carlo define a high roller? I remember reading an article about Bruce Willis playing blackjack in Vegas for $50,000 a hand. When I mentioned this at Monte-Carlo I was told in no uncertain terms that Mr. Willis would not be considered a high roller here.

Which is not to say he wouldn’t be welcome. A good part of the comeback story at Monte-Carlo is based on management’s realization that the year is not 1900 but 2000. The four casinos operated by SBM here are designed to appeal to a wide variety of players. The Casino de Monte-Carlo and the summers-only casino at the Sporting Club offer both American games (blackjack, craps, American roulette, and slots) and French games (baccarat, French and English roulette, trente et quarante) while the Sun Casino in the Monte-Carlo Grand Hotel and the Café de Paris casino only have American games.

But there are now over a thousand casinos in the world just itching to take your action at whatever level you are prepared to give it. To compete in this market, the casino - and the entire country, whose economy revolves around it - has fallen back on the one thing that made it what it was in the first place.

Service.

Francois Blanc, the father of the modern-day casino, knew all about service. He took charge of the ailing six-year-old casino in 1863, fresh from his first casino success in the German town of Bad Homburg. Europe was a fairly straightforward place back then: you either had lots of money or you were as good as poor. Francois Blanc decided to go where the money was, targeting those who had so much wealth they could afford to gamble a king’s ransom on the spin of a wheel, and sometimes did. They were the rich and powerful, or at least their wives, friends, and ne’er-do-well relatives were. The kind of customers who expected to be treated like royalty, because so many of them were.

For the Monegasques, as the natives of Monaco are known, becoming specialists in service was not too hard a sell. When all your land is rocks, you have to look somewhere for your food. The mid 19th century craze of ocean bathing brought lots of tourists to the Mediterranean coast, and only the wealthy were tourists back then. So a culture of service developed among the local population.

Like most things, you notice service most when it’s not there. After a couple of days in Monaco - still waiting for the interview - we took a quick trip to Cannes, of film festival fame. The restaurant was nice, the food fine, but the level of service so standard it was shocking - almost as shocking as realizing how spoiled we’d become in such a short time.

Finally we got the call: Meet Mr. Palmaro in the cabaret for midnight supper. He was a charming Monegasque who had worked his way up through the casino, starting as a page at the age of 16 (any USA schools offering “page” degrees?). Now he was the manager of the most famous casino on earth.

Palmaro told us about the new Monte-Carlo, which he was helping create. A renewed emphasis on culture was being extended to include sports and international media events, to appeal to younger clients. The casino spa, the Thermes Marins, had been completely refurbished and was being heavily marketed to young and old. The Grimaldi Center, a new state-of-the-art event/expo center, was then in the works, and opened earlier this year. To aggressively woo high rollers, SBM was operating offices in financial capitals around the world. Including Zurich.