Kings of the Cardroom: Bobby Baldwin, Benny Binion, Bill Boyd and Jack Binion
Not every giant of poker made his name holding cards. Some built the rooms the cards were dealt in. The four men here shaped Las Vegas poker from the other side of the table, as casino founders, cardroom managers, and the executives who turned a rough downtown game into a global industry. One won a world title before running the Strip’s grandest resorts. One invented the World Series of Poker. One ran the same cardroom for over forty years and gave the game a whole new variant. And one grew a single tournament into the sport’s championship. These are the kings of the cardroom.
Bobby Baldwin
Bobby Baldwin is the rare man who conquered poker and then went and ran the casinos. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, around 1950, he was known at the table as “The Owl” for the unblinking stare he fixed on his opponents, and in the late 1970s that stare made him one of the best players alive.
His run at the World Series of Poker was ferocious. In 1977 he won two bracelets in a single summer, taking the $10,000 Deuce-to-Seven Draw and the $5,000 Seven-Card Stud events. The next year he won the one that mattered most: the 1978 WSOP Main Event, beating Crandell Addington heads-up to become, at 28, the youngest world champion in the tournament’s history to that point. He added a fourth bracelet in 1979. Then, with nothing left to prove on the felt, he changed careers.
It turned out he was even better at the second one. Baldwin joined the Golden Nugget as a consultant in 1982 and was its president within two years. From there he ran the Mirage, became president of the Bellagio when it opened in 1998, and eventually rose to run CityCenter and serve as a top executive at MGM Resorts before retiring in 2018. Few people have ever moved from winning the game to running the buildings quite so completely.
He left a mark on both worlds. He wrote a section of Doyle Brunson’s Super/System, the strategy book that taught a generation how to play, and to this day the most exclusive high-stakes game in Las Vegas runs in “Bobby’s Room” at the Bellagio, named in his honor. Champion, author, and casino boss: Baldwin is the clearest proof that the smartest players often end up owning the room.
Benny Binion
If one man invented modern Las Vegas poker, it was Benny Binion. Born in Pilot Grove, Texas, in 1904, he had almost no formal schooling and learned everything that mattered on the road with his horse-trading father, at the county fairs and trade days where he first found gambling. He was a natural, and not always a legal one. Binion ran illegal games in Dallas for years, collected a criminal record that included a conviction for shooting a rival, and in 1946, when his political protection dried up, he left Texas for Las Vegas a step ahead of the law.
Vegas was the making of him. In 1951 he opened Binion’s Horseshoe, and he ran it on a philosophy he never bothered to dress up: “Good food, good whiskey cheap, and a good gamble.” Much of what feels standard in a casino today started with Binion, from carpet on the floors to free drinks for players to a limousine sent for a high roller. He treated gamblers like guests, and they came.
His real gift to poker was an idea. In 1949 he staged the legendary heads-up marathon between Johnny Moss and Nick “the Greek” Dandolos, the game at the center of poker’s founding folklore. Two decades later he turned that concept into an event, inviting a handful of the best players in the world to the Horseshoe in 1970 for the first World Series of Poker. He founded the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979 and, after his death on Christmas Day in 1989, was inducted into it himself. Someone once summed him up as “the gentlest bad guy or the baddest good guy you’d ever seen.” Either way, the game he built the stage for is still the biggest in poker.
Bill Boyd
Bill Boyd ran a cardroom so well, and played so well, that he changed the game twice. Born in McNeil, Arkansas, in 1906, Boyd became the master of five-card stud at exactly the moment it was poker’s premier form. From 1971 through 1974 he won a WSOP bracelet in the event four years running, the only player in the tournament’s history to take four straight titles in a single discipline. He was so dominant that five-card stud disappeared from the schedule after 1974, with no one left eager to face him.
His day job made him just as important. Boyd managed the poker room at the Golden Nugget from the day it opened in 1946 until it closed in 1988, more than four decades at the center of downtown Las Vegas poker. When the Mirage opened and raised the curtain on a new era of the city, Boyd was given the honor of dealing its first poker hand.
Somewhere in that long run he also fathered a game. As an executive at the Golden Nugget, Boyd introduced a variant he first called Nugget Hold’em, then Omaha Hold’em, and finally just Omaha, now one of the most popular formats on earth, spread in cardrooms and online everywhere. He was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1981, and he shares his four-year bracelet streak only with Doyle Brunson and Loren Klein. Very few players in history can claim both a real record and a lasting mark on how the game is played. Boyd could claim both.
Jack Binion
Benny Binion built the Horseshoe. His son Jack built what happened inside it. When the family regained full control of the casino in 1964, Jack, still in his twenties, became its president, with his brother Ted running the floor. Where Benny was the gambler and the legend, Jack was the operator, the one who turned his father’s ideas into a lasting business.
The most important of those ideas was the World Series of Poker. Jack began hosting it at the Horseshoe in 1970 and spent the next quarter century growing it from a handful of players and a secret-ballot vote into the sport’s undisputed championship. He understood, earlier than most, that poker could be a spectacle worth traveling for, and he built the Series into exactly that, laying the groundwork for the boom that would come long after.
Jack eventually took the Horseshoe name well beyond Las Vegas. Through Horseshoe Gaming, he moved into the riverboat casino business along the Mississippi and launched the World Poker Open, at one point a major feeder into the Series his family had created. His work earned him a place in both the American Gaming Association’s Gaming Hall of Fame and, in 2005, the Poker Hall of Fame. For a man who inherited a famous casino, Jack Binion did the harder thing: he made it matter for a whole new generation of players.
The Men Who Built the Room
Four builders, one city. A world champion who ran the Strip’s greatest resorts, the outlaw who invented the World Series, the cardroom king who fathered Omaha, and the son who turned a tournament into a championship. None of them is remembered mainly for a single famous hand. They are remembered for the rooms they ran, the games they spread, and the event that still crowns poker’s best every summer. The players get the glory. These men built the house.
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About the Author: Shawn Altbaum has been writing and editing in the online gaming industry since 2007, reporting live from the WSOP Main Event and conducting interviews with professional players. An active poker player, he combines industry expertise with firsthand knowledge of the games he covers. He currently serves as Global Head of Copywriting at NSUS Group, overseeing brand voice and content strategy across GGPoker and GGVegas.
