1960 “Las Vegas seemed to be both fascinated and frightened by the little computing machine,” reported Ray Duncan in the Independent Star-News (Dec. 5, 1960). The referenced device, via a dial on its front, advised blackjack players how to proceed with each hand, get another card or hold. The electronic instrument remembered the cards played…
1936 An $11,800 gambling win (about $205,000 today) was the largest ever in Las Vegas to that point. The payout went to a man named A. “Blacksmith” Sweitzer after playing 21 (blackjack) for two hours, starting with a $5 wager. “He ran a series of five phenomenal blackjack hands, in which he showed two ‘blackjacks’ —…
1825-1958 The hottest game in the Old West between 1825 and 1915, faro is pretty much extinct in the United States today. If you’ve never heard of it — and you aren’t alone there — it’s a fast-action, one-deck card game in which innumerable players compete against a bank rather than one another. (Learn the…
1905-1941 Imagine in the early 1900s, a block about the length of a football field, in the Mojave Desert in Nevada where gambling, drinking and prostitution prevailed free from law enforcement’s intrusion, and where fights erupted often and killings were common. And because the days were so hot, it came alive at night when locals…
1971 Adult magazine publisher Hugh Hefner announced to the media that in two years’ time, Nevada would be home to a Playboy casino in either Las Vegas or on Lake Tahoe’s South Shore. It didn’t happen, though, for 35 years until, in 2006, the Playboy Club — a hybrid casino and lounge — debuted in the…
1932-1967 Inmates strutted around the Nevada State Prison yard and jingled the brass coins or tokens, in their pockets, to boast their elevated status as winning gamblers of the pen. Beginning in 1932, convicts ran an open casino on the grounds of this maximum security facility in Carson City. The warden allowed and didn’t hide…