The sign over 128 Fremont Street says Binion’s. It has since the mid-2000s. Longtime residents and most of the dealers still call the building the Horseshoe, the name it carried for more than fifty years, when it was the best-known gambling hall in the country and the place where the World Series of Poker was invented.
The building
The structure is older than the casino. The Hotel Apache opened on the site in 1932, a five-story building with the first elevator in Las Vegas, built to catch the traffic from the Hoover Dam construction. Through the 1930s and ’40s the ground floor passed through a series of clubs, ending as the Eldorado Club.
Benny Binion arrived in 1946. He had run gambling in Dallas through the 1930s and left Texas when a new district attorney made that untenable. In 1951 he bought the Eldorado and the hotel above it and opened the Horseshoe Club.
Binion’s changes were mostly about the customer. He raised the table limits well above what the other downtown houses allowed, let players set their own limit on the first bet at craps, put carpet on the floor, served free drinks to anyone gambling, and kept the food cheap. His line about it, repeated in nearly every account of the man, was that the way to get rich was to make little people feel like big people. The Horseshoe ran full for the rest of the century.
The million dollars
In 1954 the Horseshoe put $1 million in cash on display on the casino floor: one hundred $10,000 bills, mounted inside a horseshoe-shaped frame. Visitors could have a free photograph taken in front of it, and for the next forty-six years that photograph was a standard Las Vegas souvenir. The bills were sold to a collector in 2000. The frame survived; the display did not.
1970
In 1970, Binion invited a group of the best-known high-stakes players in the country to the Horseshoe for a series of cash games. At the end, the players voted on who had played best. Johnny Moss won the vote and a silver cup. The event was called the World Series of Poker.
In 1971 the format changed to a freezeout tournament with a fixed buy-in, which settled at $10,000 and has stayed there. Fields in the 1970s were a few dozen players. By the early 2000s, after televised coverage and online qualifying, they were in the thousands, and the final tables were still being dealt on the Horseshoe’s casino floor with spectators behind a rope.
Harrah’s Entertainment bought the Horseshoe in 2004, kept the brand and the tournament, and moved the World Series to the Rio in 2005. The downtown property was sold the same year and renamed Binion’s Gambling Hall. The Horseshoe name later went to the Strip, on the former Bally’s. The downtown poker room is still there.
Hotel Apache, again
TLC Casino Enterprises, which owns the Four Queens next door, bought Binion’s in 2008. The hotel tower closed in 2009, and for ten years the property operated as a casino and steakhouse with no rooms.
In 2019 the original Hotel Apache floors reopened under their original name. The renovation kept the 1932 proportions: small rooms, transom windows, brass fixtures, and the elevator story on a plaque in the lobby. The rooms are among the few places to sleep in Las Vegas that predate the Strip.
The steakhouse on the top floor, with windows facing north over Fremont Street, has operated continuously through the changes in ownership. It is one of the oldest restaurants in the city still in its original location.
Now
Binion’s today is a modest property: a casino, an 81-room hotel, a steakhouse, and a wall of photographs from the Horseshoe years. The World Series of Poker, now held at the Paris and Horseshoe on the Strip, drew more than 10,000 entrants to its main event in 2023 and 2024. The table where the first one was decided was on the floor at 128 Fremont.