Binions Deal Closes

[zengrifter]

Mar. 11, 2008
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Deal puts Binion's in local hands

By BENJAMIN SPILLMAN
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Binion's Gambling Hall & Hotel is back under local ownership after the close of a deal that netted more than $28 million for the Fremont Street property's former owners.


MORE- http://www.lvrj.com/business/16489566.html

[shadroch]

And people saythere is no God.

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by shadroch

And people saythere is no God.

Games just got worse and security tightened. zg

[Doofus]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

Games just got worse and security tightened. zg

There were shitty games at Binions before the deal closed, and now it'll be like the Four Queens, which at least still has 3:2 SD (of a sort). It's a step up in quality from gonorrhea to chlamydia.

[shadroch]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

Games just got worse and security tightened. zg

Impossible.What could be worse than 6 deck h17,6-5 BJ?


MNTR paid $20 million plus,,suffered losses every quarter and sold it for $32 million. What counting system is the author using to say that MNTR netted $28 million on the deal.

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by shadroch

Impossible.What could be worse than 6 deck h17,6-5 BJ?

MNTR paid $20 million plus,,suffered losses every quarter and sold it for $32 million. What counting system is the author using to say that MNTR netted $28 million on the deal.

I hope he didn't say netted - should say GROSSED.

I didn't know that the games got so bad there. In early 05 when they took it over the games were quite good. During that period I ran into some of the best players in the world there. zg

[aslan]

I visited there last month. It is a real dump. It will take a monumental makeover. But it's in a good location and has great name recognition going for it. Too bad they can't resurrect the "Horseshoe" name. But if I were the new owners I would plaster Binion's history all over the place, including it's "former" name (in a historical context, naturally--I think that would be legal--like who has a monopoly on history?).

[shadroch]

I'd take a step back in time and split the casino up into The Mint and Binions,just like it was in the heyday.Put some big screen tvs up showing clips of Police Story and other shows that featured the exterior.
Then I would reintroduce the horseshoe with the 100 $10,000 bills that you could pose for a picture with. Next I'd turn the Steakhouse into the biggest after-hours in Vegas.

[aslan]

Originally Posted by shadroch

I'd take a step back in time and split the casino up into The Mint and Binions,just like it was in the heyday.Put some big screen tvs up showing clips of Police Story and other shows that featured the exterior.
Then I would reintroduce the horseshoe with the 100 $10,000 bills that you could pose for a picture with. Next I'd turn the Steakhouse into the biggest after-hours in Vegas.

Great ideas. They should hire you as their consultant.

Did you see what they did to the Aladdin? On the cheap and lost what class it ever had. It was never a Bellagio, but it was a decent looking place to gamble. Now they have fabric wrapped lights (do-it-yourself home decorating 101) along side beautiful crystal globes leftover from the former Aladdin, and new but cheap looking carpets and room furniture.

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by aslan

I would plaster Binion's history all over the place,

Ya, the REAL Benny history, told most detailed by Denton and Morris in The Money and The Power - How Las Vegas became America's Shadow Capital. Unfortunately the Binion chapter, worth the price of the book, is not available online... but this is -

Excerpt Chapter 1

1. Meyer Lansky

The Racketeer as Chairman of the Board

He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 at Grodno, in a Poland possessed by Tsarist Russia. As a child he envisioned the United States as a place of angels, "somewhat like heaven," he would say much later. When he was ten, his family fled the pogroms directed at Jews for the land of his dreams. In the Grand Street tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan he found not angels but what he called his "overpowering memory"-poverty, and still more savage prejudice.

In school, where he excelled, his name was Americanized. Meyer Lansky was a slight child, smaller than his peers. But he soon acquired a reputation as a fierce, courageous fighter. One day, as he walked home with a dish of food for his family, he was stopped by a gang of older Irish toughs whose leader wielded a knife and ordered him to take down his pants to show if he was circumcised. Suddenly, the little boy lunged at his tormentor, shattering the plate into a weapon, then nearly killing the bigger boy with the jagged china, though he was almost beaten to death himself by the rest of the gangbefore the fight was broken up. Eventually, he would become renowned for his intelligence rather than his physical strength. Yet no one who knew him ever doubted that beneath the calm cunning was a reserve of brutality.

He left school after the eighth grade, to find in the streets and back alleys of New York his philosophy, his view of America, ultimately his vocation. He lived in a world dominated by pimps and prostitutes, protection and extortion, alcohol and narcotics, legitimate businesses as fronts, corrupt police, and ultimately, always, the rich and powerful who owned it all but kept their distance. There was gambling everywhere, fed by the lure of easy money in a country where the prospects of so many, despite the promise, remained bleak and uncertain.

A gifted mathematician with an intuitive sense of numbers, he was

naturally drawn to craps games. He was able to calculate the odds in

his head. Lore would have it that he lost only once before he drew an

indelible lesson about gambling and life. "There's no such thing as a

lucky gambler, there are just the winners and losers. The winners are

those who control the game . . . all the rest are suckers," he would

say. "The only man who wins is the boss." He decided that he would be

the boss. He adopted another, grander axiom as well: that crime and

corruption were no mere by-products of the economics and politics of

his adopted country, but rather a cornerstone. That understanding,

too, tilted the odds in his favor.

MORE- http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/di...w=printexcerpt