Before his first day at Morgan Stanley in 2006, James Gorman went to Las Vegas to play poker. He watched Texas hold 'em for hours, without ordering a drink. Once he started playing, he won hundreds of dollars, says a person who was there.

It isn't much of a gambling story, especially by Wall Street standards. But it explains why the 51-year-old Gorman is about to become the first postcrisis chief executive on Wall Street.