KVIG Informative

Benny Binion didn’t invent the World Series of Poker. He bought it from a Reno casino owner, moved it downtown and set a $10,000 buy-in that still defines the tournament’s Main Event today, 55 years after his family lost the casino that hosted it.

Lester Benjamin “Benny” Binion was born near Dallas-Fort Worth on Nov. 20, 1904, according to a University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections finding aid for the Binion’s Horseshoe Casino Records on Poker. He bought the Eldorado Club on Fremont Street in 1951 and renamed it the Horseshoe Club, the same finding aid states. A tax evasion conviction in 1953 forced him to sell most of his interest in the club to Joe W. Brown, though he later regained full ownership even after losing his own gaming license; Binion stayed on the property’s payroll as a consultant for decades afterward, according to the same source.

Binion had experimented with tournament poker before. In 1949, he arranged an extended head-to-head match between Nick “the Greek” Dandolos and Johnny Moss, the UNLV finding aid states. The business was renamed Binion’s Horseshoe in 1964, with his son Jack Binion installed as president and another son, Lonnie “Ted” Binion, as casino manager, according to the same record.

In 1970, Binion bought the rights to host the World Series of Poker from a casino owner in Reno and began running the tournament annually at the Horseshoe, with a buy-in of $10,000, according to the same UNLV finding aid. The finding aid does not name the Reno owner or say what the event was called before Binion acquired it. A separate women’s poker event was added to the tournament lineup in 1977, the same source states.

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Binion died on Dec. 25, 1989, at age 85, according to the same UNLV record. Jack Binion donated the family’s WSOP publicity and promotional materials, most of them generated by press agent Henri Bollinger, to UNLV Special Collections in 1991, with additional donations in 2004, 2022 and 2025, the finding aid states.

Harrah’s Entertainment announced a definitive agreement to buy Binion’s Horseshoe Hotel & Casino on Jan. 22, 2004, according to the company’s own press release filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The downtown property had been closed since Jan. 9 of that year, and Harrah’s said it intended to reopen it and host the tournament’s 35th annual running at the Horseshoe on its originally scheduled spring dates once regulators approved the sale, the same release states. The release said current Binion’s employees would get priority in rehiring and that Harrah’s intended to honor the property’s existing union contracts.

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The tournament Binion bought for a $10,000 buy-in in 1970 is now, by Caesars Entertainment’s own description, listed under its Caesars Digital operations and billed as poker’s longest-running tournament, dating to that same year, according to the company’s official WSOP fact sheet. The same fact sheet reports more than $3.63 billion in total prize money awarded and a Main Event entry record of 10,043 players, breaking the previous record of 8,773 set in 2006. The event returned to the Las Vegas Strip in 2022 after years at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino and moved to the Horseshoe Las Vegas, the tournament’s original downtown location under a different name, by 2023, the same fact sheet states.

Binion’s family held the Horseshoe for 53 years after he bought the Eldorado Club in 1951. Caesars Entertainment has now run the tournament he built longer than his own family did, under a corporate structure that lists it alongside the company’s digital betting products. The $10,000 number he picked to keep the game serious is still the price of admission to the tournament bearing his legacy, even though almost nothing else about who runs it would be familiar to him.