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’ — an ace and a face card — and drew ‘21’ to two ‘11-splits,’” the Nevada State Journal reported. “He bet $250 on each hand.”

Photo from freeimages.com: “Blackjack2” by Tracy Scott-Murray

Sign denoting a faro bank inside

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 rules of faro and play.) 

The game, also called farobank, has been around since the Middle Ages, but the version played in the U.S. sprang from 17th century France. Le faro is French for “pharaoh,” taken from the picture on the back of the cards used in the game.

Faro grew in popularity during the 19th century in America where, oftentimes, dealers traveled with their equipment, offering a bank for games where they could.

It was a common pastime in The Silver State’s mining towns, such as Virginia City. Nevadans referred to it as “bucking the tiger,” which derived from the picture of a tiger displayed on walls outside saloons denoting a faro bank inside.

During Prohibition, much of gambling nationwide went underground. Whereas most games resurfaced after ratification of the 21st Amendment in 1933 — poker, blackjack, slot machines and more — faro didn’t.

“Despite its long history, in modern times even references to the game of faro have all but disappeared. For example, books, Western films, and popular Western TV shows of the 1970s all disregarded faro in favor of poker,” wrote the authors of In the Pursuit of Winning.

Faro lived its last days in Nevada. By the 1950s, only a few casinos offered it. One was the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, which made the game available through 1955. People could play it in Reno until 1958 at the Ramada Hotel Casino and until 1964 at the Golden Hotel.

Too Little Profit

What led to faro’s demise? Primarily, the small house edge on it, experts speculate. Ultimately, casinos preferred games that afforded them a greater margin. Because faro favored players more than any other game of chance, they could win a lot, as the following quote suggests.

“The men who “buck the tiger” are waxing fat these days,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Oct. 20, 1904). “It is stated that there is not a gambling house in town that is making money. This is not because the games are not being played, for every night the rooms are crowded and each table is surrounded by eager players. The fact is the players are winning, steadily.”

Sources

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 and passers-through pursued their vices and recreation, including billiards, bowling, music and dancing.

Such a place existed — the original Sin City.

“That part of Las Vegas looked like a rip-roaring, whiskey-drinking, gun-toting, gambling town, while the rest of the town was conservative and business-like,” wrote Stanley Paher in Las Vegas: As It Began—As It Grew.

This frontier area developed in 1905 after William Clark, who with his brother developed the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake railroad, founded the Las Vegas Townsite. He divided 110 acres into 38 parcels of land, each 1,200 square feet in size, which he auctioned. He designated only two of those — Blocks 16 and 17 — as places where liquor could be sold legally. Properties on the other blocks contained a “no liquor” clause in their deed.

Block 16 was located on today’s First Street between Ogden and Stewart avenues. While prostitution primarily was limited to that area and with the free flow of alcohol there,* Block 16 alone earned the name Sin City. The early brothels were located in the rear or upper rooms, or “cribs,” of some of the saloons.

“… riotous Block 16 was the only seat of pleasure. Nearly every night, including Christmas, it ran full blast. The Gem, the Red Onion, the Turf, the Favorite, the OO (Double-O), the Star, the Arcade saloons and the Arizona Club were continually crowded with sharp-eyed dealers and boosters and men standing around trying to solve the mysteries of gambling. All night long sounded the strains of music, the rattle of ivory chips and the clink of silver and gold coins on the tables of faro, roulette, craps, black jack and poker,” Paher wrote.

Tolerance Fades

In the early 1940s, the U.S. Army Air Corps (now the U.S. Air Force) was considering an area outside of town for base facilities for an aerial gunnery school and told city officials that as long as Block 16 existed, servicemen wouldn’t be allowed to enter Las Vegas. Afraid of losing the potential economic windfall from those corpsmen, the city began eradicating Block 16 in 1941.

Law enforcement conducted a series of raids, during which they arrested numerous prostitutes. In 1942, the city revoked all gaming and liquor licenses of Block 16’s businesses. Consequently, income from these vices decreased, and proprietors soon after ceased operations, thereby killing off Sin City.

The facilities, particularly the brothels, later were used through the duration of World War II as inexpensive rooming houses until 1946, when the city deemed them inhabitable and razed them. The land eventually was paved to serve as parking lots, and it still does. They can be found behind Binion’s Gambling Hall & Hotel and just east of the California Hotel-Casino, in the heart of downtown Las Vegas.

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*Even during Prohibition, alcohol was available widely on Block 16.

Sources

Photo from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ University Libraries

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 Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. 

It was the first time in 50 years Nevada allowed a gaming licensee to charge patrons a cover to access gambling tables. Along with slot machines, the club offered blackjack and roulette tables staffed by women dressed as bunnies.

It closed in 2012.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons: “Playboy Logo” by Downtowngal

Nevada State Prison

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 it, and the public knew.

Over the ensuing years, the men played craps, panguingue, blackjack, poker, tonk, gin rummy and perhaps non-card games like roulette (although one warden denied that) and bet on sports — all using tokens, $0.05, $0.10, $0.25, $0.50, $1 and $5, as currency.

They did so under supervision in the convicts’ recreation area dubbed the bullpen. The inmates didn’t tolerate cheating, which kept the operations honest. As mandated, winners contributed 10 percent of their receipts to the prison’s inmate welfare fund.

Many prisoners passed the time by gambling, which they said prevented tension and conflict among them. Also, it gave the dealers and winners income and prestige.

Though, as in any casino, a fair amount of losing occurred. “Most of them go broke,” said Art Bernard, the warden between 1951 and 1958 (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 26, 1957).

Breaking The Rules

Ironically, the prison casino lacked a gambling license, a state requirement of any such operation. It violated Nevada gaming law, too, by dealing with “persons of notorious or unsavory reputation or who have extensive police records,” noted columnist Frank Johnson (Nevada State Journal, Jan. 9, 1960). “On the plus side,” he added, “one can say not only all employees, but all patrons as well, have their fingerprints on file with the authorities. And the gaming IS conducted in a location that is ‘easy to police.’”

The fun, however, ended 35 years later, in 1967, when Warden Carl Hocker put a permanent kibosh on the casino and brass.

“I think gambling in prison is degrading, and it’s certainly not constructive,” he said (Nevada State Journal, May 7, 1967). “We’re trying to replace it with constructive, wholesome activities that will contribute to a decent, healthful frame of mind.”

Do you suppose the prisoners then took their gambling underground and switched the currency to something else?

Sources

Bob Bamford and, right, Joe Alper, with Mark II

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 but, also, computed the math of various complex blackjack scenarios. Its operation required “some very fast and frantic switching on the part of its operators,” explained Duncan.

“[The inventors] maintained that their machine and their system has a carefully calculated mathematical edge over the house, if allowed to play freely without a mid-way reshuffle, and that in the long run its statistical expectation is to win at a small but steady rate.”

This 5-pound apparatus, which the reporter noted resembled a “small table radio sliced in two pieces,” was created by two unmarried engineers who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California —  Bob Bamford, 30, and Joe Alper, 22. They called their contraption Mark II, as it was the third iteration; the media dubbed it the “Pasadena robot.”

Construction and testing of Mark II had taken about 100 hours, 100,000 blackjack games and $150 (about $1,200 today) for the components.

Taking It Live

Alper and Bamford traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada to try Mark II in a few casinos. They called ahead for permission, which the Flamingo, Desert Inn and Silver Slipper granted. The Sahara didn’t.

Starting at the Flamingo, they won $29 ($242 today) in the first 10 minutes — nearly $3 ($80) a minute. Consequently, the dealer reshuffled the card deck mid-game, which destroyed Mark II’s computing advantage. The engineers balked at that move and asked to play without mid-game shuffling. Ultimately, after much deliberation, the casino personnel said no.

The pair next tried the Dunes, where they were limited to betting $5 ($41 today) a hand, which again hindered Mark II’s abilities. However, despite the restriction, after three hours of playing, the Pasadenans won $107 ($896 today). 

“But this was nothing like the take they calculated to bring home with their $750 [$6,280 in 2018] stake, if they were allowed to play a straight, cards-as-they-come, bet-as-you-like game,” Duncan indicated.

The following day, the two couldn’t find a Vegas casino that would let them use their machine and that wouldn’t hedge against potential losses.

“We’re not gamblers here,”‘ one casino owner told them. “We’re in the gambling business.”

Bamford and Alper returned home and to their jobs.

Sources

Photo from the Independent Star-News (Pasadena, Calif.), Dec. 4, 1960