Silver Slipper, 1950s

1956

The gambling licensees of the Dunes and Silver Slipper casinos applied to restart bingo on the premises, but the Nevada Gaming Commission denied their request, stating that the return of the game to the Las Vegas Strip would be detrimental to the area.

This was because in prior years when bingo had been permitted, the competition had gotten out of hand and the ample prize money had drawn so many people, it had created traffic problems.

Howard Hughes, 1973

1968

Howard Hughes, billionaire industrialist, received the Nevada Gaming Commission’s blessing to buy the Stardust hotel-casino in Las Vegas for $30.5 million and moved forward with the acquisition.

He already owned five such properties on the Strip — the Castaways, Silver Slipper, Frontier, Sands and Desert Inn. (Adding the Stardust would’ve given him control of about 14 percent of Nevada’s gambling volume.) 

A few days before the deal’s closing, however, the U.S. Department of Justice asked Hughes to delay it by 90 days so it could investigate whether the Stardust purchase would violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Instead, he abandoned the transaction altogether.

August 5, 1943 Help Wanted ad

1937-1970

Card dealing was a male-dominated profession in Nevada’s casinos until 1937, when Harolds Club, in Reno, put the first woman at a 21 table to deal.

Co-owner Harold Smith previously had been hiring women, mostly family members, for other jobs on the gambling club floor — chip stacking and roulette wheel spinning, for instance — but never dealing.

Smith’s concern had been that women would be too-easy targets for cheaters and, consequently, the casino would get fleeced. (A total of up to 10,000 silver dollars sat on the various tables during a typical night.)

Smith, though, soon realized women could hold their own, and both genders enjoyed gambling with a “pretty, smiling dealer” (Lima News, Aug. 4, 1943).

With World War II and the resulting shortage of men to employ, women filled the gap at Harolds Club. By that time, 90 percent of the employees there were female. Smith launched a school to train women to become professional dealers. They learned how to deal cards, spin wheels, rake in chips, compute payoffs and watch for cheaters’ tricks, among other skills.

Smith advertised in local newspapers’ Help Wanted sections for recruits in ads indicating, “Men Please Do Not Apply” (Nevada State Journal, Aug. 4, 1943). The pay was $25 per week while attending his school, then up to $60 per week when hired. Students ran the gamut, and included housewives, divorcées (women living in Nevada the requisite six weeks to get an expedited divorce), telephone operators, school teachers, sales clerks, stenographers and newspaper reporters.

By 1943, casinos throughout Northern Nevada were hiring graduates of Smith’s school.

Slow To Change

It was the opposite in Las Vegas. Although women worked as dealers in nearby towns such as Henderson and North Las Vegas, none did on the Strip or in downtown Sin City until 1970, nearly three decades later.

That year, the Silver Slipper, a Howard Hughes-owned casino, hired the first — 47-year-old Jean Brady, who had years of experience from dealing at other Silver State gambling houses.

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