KEY TAKEAWAYS
Poker has plenty of famous rooms, but only one is called the place where the World Series of Poker began. The Horseshoe, now Binion’s Gambling Hall, sits on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. It hosted the WSOP from 1970 through 2005, long enough to see the Main Event grow from a single game into a tournament with thousands of entrants. Players such as Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson and Stu Ungar sat at its final tables. This feature follows the building’s story and describes what the old home of the WSOP is like to visit, based on Binion’s own history page, WSOP.com and two Las Vegas Sun reports from 2016 and 2018. Because venues, prices and schedules change, anything about the present is dated to the report it comes from, and readers should check the casino’s official site before traveling.
Benny Binion’s Horseshoe
Binion’s own history page says that Benny Binion bought the property at 128 Fremont Street in 1951 and introduced the Horseshoe Club to the downtown strip then known as Glitter Gulch. The casino says Binion installed carpet and air conditioning when neither was standard and was the first casino owner to offer players rides to and from the airport. Those are the casino’s own claims about its founder, so they are better read as the house account than as an independent finding.
The building grew. According to the casino, Binion bought the neighboring Boulder Club in 1960, and his sons bought the Mint Hotel in 1988 to double the property’s size. WSOP.com dates the Mint expansion to 1987 and says it tripled the Horseshoe’s size, so the sources disagree on both the year and the scale of the annex. What both agree on is that the extra space gave the tournament far more room than it had ever had.
The Sun’s 2016 report described the Horseshoe’s reputation for generosity. Nolan Dalla, who worked as a Binion’s spokesman from 2001 to 2003 and was the WSOP’s media director when the Sun interviewed him in 2016, recalled that Benny Binion and then his son Jack regularly gave gamblers free rooms, drinks and food. The paper added that the casino was also known for accepting craps bets of $1 million and $777,000 in the early 1980s. For a Las Vegas poker fan, Dalla told the Sun, the Horseshoe was “the Wrigley Field or Fenway Park of casinos.”
The First WSOP in 1970
WSOP.com says that the first World Series of Poker took place in 1970 at the Binion’s Horseshoe, played by seven of the leading players of the time: Johnny Moss, Amarillo Slim Preston, Sailor Roberts, Doyle Brunson, Puggy Pearson, Crandell Addington and Carl Cannon. It was a cash game, and at the end the players voted on who was best. Each initially voted for himself, so they were told to vote again for the next best player, and Moss was declared the first champion. WSOP.com adds that Moss won the title again the next year and in 1974, and that the second WSOP expanded to five tournaments.
The size of that first game is a point on which accounts differ. WSOP.com says seven players. The Sun’s 2016 report described a six-person invitational at a small table between two restrooms, and Binion’s own history says the game began with 10 of Benny’s friends. This article does not choose among them; the three accounts count the field differently, and none of the sources used here documents the exact lineup beyond WSOP.com’s list.
The 2018 Sun report added a present-day detail: the spot where Moss won in 1970 is now an office for casino hosts. Binion’s general manager at the time, Tim Lager, told the paper it was striking to think the series started as a single game in that spot and grew into what it became. The Sun reported that the 2018 Main Event had 7,874 players competing for a $74 million prize pool.
Where the Final Table Sat
WSOP.com published a history of the Main Event’s final-table venues, and it shows how the tournament outgrew the building one move at a time. The table below summarizes it, using the site’s own descriptions.
| Period | Where the final table was played |
|---|---|
| Early years | A small alcove inside the Horseshoe, usually reserved for high-stakes baccarat and blackjack |
| Mid-1970s | The rear of the Horseshoe, next to a large bar, which was home for the next decade |
| After the 1987 Mint annex | The newer, larger area; every champion was crowned there until 1997 |
| 1997 | Outdoors on Fremont Street, under the new Fremont Street Experience canopy |
| 1998 | Back indoors at the Horseshoe |
| 1999 onward | Benny’s Bullpen, a ballroom otherwise used for bingo |
The outdoor experiment is the most vivid entry. WSOP.com said the 1997 final table, the year of Stu Ungar’s last victory, was moved outside because the new Fremont Street Experience made downtown merchants eager for the television cameras. The experiment was judged a failure, largely because of heat, with players sweating in 90-degree weather, and the 1998 final, won by Scotty Nguyen, was held indoors. The 1997 story is told in Stu Ungar’s 1997 comeback.
The Sun’s 2016 report described Benny’s Bullpen as the informal name for the second-floor Longhorn Ballroom. WSOP.com says the final table moved there in 1999 and that it was the location of Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 Main Event win, a result retold in the Moneymaker Bluff. The Sun also reported that Main Event fields did not top 400 players before the 2000s, and that some tables were once placed outside on Fremont Street until Gaming Control Board rules began requiring video surveillance of each table in 1998.
Players Who Remember It
Phil Hellmuth played his first WSOP at the old Horseshoe in 1988, according to the Sun. He recalled an all-in hand against Johnny Chan, the returning champion, in which Hellmuth had pocket 10s, Chan had pocket jacks and Hellmuth lost. The paper noted that Chan went on to beat Erik Seidel heads-up that year, the match dramatized in Rounders, and that Hellmuth won the title the following year, beating Chan heads-up for $755,000. The 1988 final is covered in the Chan and Seidel final hand, and Hellmuth’s career is in his profile. Hellmuth told the Sun: “It was more of a brotherhood back then.”
How the WSOP Left in 2005
The move away was driven by ownership, not by a decision to leave. The Sun reported that the Binion family kept the casino until 2004, when Harrah’s Entertainment, now Caesars Entertainment, bought it and the World Series of Poker and promptly sold the property to MTR Gaming Group while keeping the WSOP and Horseshoe brands. WSOP.com gives the same sequence and adds that Harrah’s moved the series to the Rio Hotel and Casino in 2005, where it stayed until the current host properties, the Horseshoe and Paris, in 2022.
The Sun described the Rio as larger and more modern. The paper quoted a WSOP spokesman, Seth Palansky, describing it as having 200,000 square feet of convention space, not being on the Strip and having a parking garage next to it. The 2005 series still ended downtown. WSOP.com said an agreement with then-Mayor Oscar Goodman, who wanted to mark the city’s centennial, brought the Main Event final table back to the old Horseshoe one last time, and that Joe Hachem’s win ended up being the final WSOP-related event played there. According to the Sun, the casino is now officially known as the original home of the World Series.
Visiting Binion’s Today
Binion’s remains a working casino with a poker room, but the details below are dated. The Sun visited on a Tuesday night in June 2016 and found about 50 tourists and locals, half playing a tournament and half a $100-minimum cash game, in a room just off Fremont Street. The room had glass walls and a few small sets of stairs on each side. The paper said an auxiliary area of 15 tables once used for WSOP overflow was empty and dark, and so was Benny’s Bullpen.
Two years later, the Sun reported that the poker room mostly offered small-stakes games, that framed pictures of each WSOP champion and each Hall of Fame member hung in the room, and that Hall of Fame banquets were still held at the casino. Lager told the paper that people who had played the WSOP years earlier sometimes brought their children, who had turned 21, to see where they started. In 2014 and 2015, according to the 2016 report, the Bullpen hosted the WSOP Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
The Binion’s history page also states that the WSOP no longer takes place at the property and that the casino is owned by TLC Casino Enterprises, which bought it in March 2008. That page is the casino’s own, and it is undated, so it should be read as the owner’s description. Anyone planning a visit should use the casino’s official site for current hours, game lists and age rules. For planning the WSOP itself, see the Las Vegas trip planning guide.
Why the Place Still Matters
The Horseshoe matters because it holds the story of a tournament that grew with the game. In 1970 it hosted a gathering of a handful of the top players. By the time it left, the series had outgrown the room that had hosted it. The Sun’s 2016 report called the casino hallowed ground for poker players. Dalla told the paper that “There’s something majestic about sitting at the place where it all began.”
It also matters because of how the story reached the public. Many of the hands and finishes that fans still talk about happened there, and the 2003 Main Event final table was played in the Bullpen, according to WSOP.com. The camera work that made that broadcast possible is covered in how the hole-card camera turned poker into TV.
The Other Side of the Nostalgia
Nostalgia is selective. The Sun’s 2016 report described a casino whose poker action had moved elsewhere, with the glamour of the series now at larger properties. The paper also noted that the casino had once been barred from hosting World Series events after the Harrah’s purchase, though relations with Caesars had improved by 2016. A trip to the Horseshoe is a visit to a history lesson, and the present-day poker there is modest.
The old days also had a cost to the people who played them. Retellings of the Horseshoe years focus on champions, and the many players who lost money at the Horseshoe do not appear in the framed photographs. Poker is not a reliable source of income, and a trip built around the game should be planned around what a traveler can afford to lose. Legal age and the rules for real-money poker vary by venue and place, so they should be confirmed with the casino.
Myths About the Horseshoe
Myth: the WSOP has always been held at the Horseshoe. WSOP.com says the series started there in 1970 and moved to the Rio after Harrah’s bought the property, with the final table played downtown one last time in 2005.
Myth: the first WSOP had a Main Event with a big field. The first event was a cash game with a vote, according to WSOP.com, and the Sun said Main Event fields did not top 400 before the 2000s.
Myth: the Horseshoe is gone. The building still operates as Binion’s Gambling Hall, according to the Sun’s 2018 report and the casino’s own history page, although it is under different ownership and no longer hosts the series.
What to Read Next
To see what the series looks like now, read the Main Event structure and day-by-day guide. For the story behind the 2003 broadcasts that followed the Horseshoe years, see the hole-card camera article linked above.
