The Horseshoe, the million dollars in the lobby, and the first World Series of Poker
Before poker was on television, it was a handful of men in a downtown casino. The building is still here. So is the story.
Stand on Fremont Street outside Binion’s and look up at the sign. It says Binion’s, not Horseshoe, and it has since the mid-2000s, but ask anyone who has been in Las Vegas long enough and they will call the building the Horseshoe anyway. That is the hold a place gets when it was, for a few decades, the most famous gambling hall in the world.
Benny
Benny Binion arrived from Dallas in 1946, a year after a Texas gambling career that ended with the law losing patience. He bought into downtown and, in 1951, opened the Horseshoe Club in the old Eldorado Club building, which itself sat on the bones of the Hotel Apache, a 1932 hotel that had the first elevator in Las Vegas.
Binion’s innovations were practical. He raised the craps limit far above what anyone else in town allowed. He put carpet on the floor when downtown casinos had sawdust. He gave away free drinks to anyone gambling and made the food cheap. “If you want to get rich,” he said, “make little people feel like big people.” The Horseshoe filled up with little people feeling like big people, and it stayed full for fifty years.
The million dollars
In 1954, Binion put a million dollars in cash on display in the casino: one hundred ten-thousand-dollar bills, mounted inside a horseshoe-shaped case. Visitors had their photograph taken in front of it for free, and for the rest of the century a picture with the million dollars was one of the standard Las Vegas souvenirs. The display came down in 2000, when the bills were sold to a collector. The horseshoe frame is still around; the bills are not.
1970
The event that made the building famous happened almost by accident. In 1970, Benny Binion invited a group of the best-known high-stakes players in the country to play a series of cash games at the Horseshoe. At the end, the players voted on who had been the best. Johnny Moss won the vote, and the silver cup, and a thing called the World Series of Poker existed.
The next year it became a freezeout tournament with a buy-in, which is the format the whole world now knows. The buy-in settled at $10,000. Through the 1970s the field was a few dozen players; by the time the tournament outgrew the building in 2004 it was in the thousands. The final tables were played on the casino floor, in the middle of the Horseshoe, with the public watching from a rope line.
Harrah’s bought the Horseshoe in 2004, kept the brand and the tournament, and moved the World Series to the Rio in 2005. The downtown building was sold on and became Binion’s Gambling Hall. The Horseshoe name eventually ended up on the Strip, on the former Bally’s. The poker room where the thing began is still downtown.
Hotel Apache, again
The hotel tower above the casino closed in 2009, and for a decade Binion’s was a casino and a steakhouse with no rooms. In 2019 the original 1932 Hotel Apache floors were reopened under their original name, with a deliberately old-fashioned feel: transoms, brass, small rooms, and the first-elevator-in-Las-Vegas story on the wall. It is one of the few places downtown where the room you sleep in predates the canopy, the Strip, and the Hoover Dam’s first full year of operation.
The steakhouse on the top floor, with the north-facing windows over Fremont Street, has been the quiet celebration dinner for downtown regulars for longer than most of the Strip’s restaurants have existed. Ask for a window.
What’s left
Binion’s today is a modest place by Las Vegas standards: a casino, a hotel with a few dozen rooms, a steakhouse, and a wall of photographs. But there is no other building on Fremont Street where you can point to the floor and say: there, that is where it started. The game that is now played in every country on earth was invented at a table in that room, by a man who made little people feel like big people.
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