Word: binion
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These days Las Vegas has become so sanitized that some casino operators are complaining. The city's largest hotel, the Excalibur, is a medieval castle that looks like Cinderella's at Disney World. The hotel that Bugsy Siegel built, the Flamingo, is now owned by Hilton. Characters like Benny Binion, who bragged of killing those who crossed him, and Bill Harrah, who in his 60s drag-raced with teenagers on Reno streets, have been displaced by quiet, invisible graduates of business schools. The last convicted felon to be spotted by a local columnist on the Strip was Michael Milken...
Players and rubberneckers are four hours into the big, no-limit World Series of Poker freeze-out here at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. Maybe 170 players are left of the 194 who began chasing the $835,000 first prize with $10,000 each in chips. From three tables away, a raspy Texas drawl cuts through the watery green air of Binion's cardroom. Amarillo Slim Preston is telling stories, fogging his opponents with rascally nonsense. Something about beating somebody in 312 straight games of gin rummy. Something about riding a camel through a casino in Marrakech. Preston...
...Diane Borger from Winnipeg is one of five women in what is still largely a man's game. She's a psychology student at California Lutheran University, of all places, where she will have to finish her master's thesis if she doesn't place well at Binion's. Borger is small and blond, and though she's 28, she looks like a little girl. When she plays, she wears a blue cap that says TOP GUN and smokes long, skinny cigars. All you can see is her little, straight-across mouth under the peak of the cap, and that...
Poker may be the most successful U.S. export these days. Here at Binion's, where tournament poker took shape in 1970, there are good players from India, Sweden and other places that seem unlikely. Dewey Tomko estimates that there are only ten or 15 really successful players, whose lives and incomes would be comparable to those of the world's best tennis professionals. Sure, he admits when an eyebrow is raised, there are a lot of others who scuffle along at $200,000 a year, "but that's as bad as having...