Dice Roll: the Phantom Gambler

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From The Paris Review:

On September 24th, 1980, a man wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline. This meant he was betting against the woman rolling the dice. If she lost, he’d double his money. If she won, he’d lose everything. Scarcely aware of the amount riding on her dice, the woman rolled three times: 6, 9, 7.

“Pay the backline,” said the dealer. And just like that, the man won over $1.5 million. He calmly filled the empty suitcase with his winnings, exited Binion’s into the desert afternoon, and drove off. It was the largest amount ever bet on a dice roll in America.

“Mystery Man Wins Fortune,” the Los Angeles Times reported. No one knew the identity of the fair-haired young Texan who’d just made history, and so he became known as the “Phantom Gambler.” “He was cool,” said Jack Binion, president of the Horseshoe. “He really had a lot of gamble in him.” But it would be years before the phantom would be seen in Vegas again.

. . . .

There’s a particular romance to all-or-nothing gamblers. They lend themselves easily to myth. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades wagered the division of the world on a game of dice. In the second book of the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic, the king Yudhishthira is tempted into a dice game in which he wagers his kingdom, his army, and his slaves, along with the freedom of his brothers, his wife, and himself—and loses. Is it better to have rolled and lost than never to have rolled at all? As Nietzsche asks in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “A throw failed you. But you dice-throwers, what does it matter?” To roll the dice is to submit to chance. The grander the wager, the starker the confrontation with the mysteries of fate at the core of the cosmos.

Nearly four years later, on March 24th, 1984, the Phantom Gambler returned to the Horseshoe. This time, his suitcase contained $538,000. Again, he put it all on the backline. And again, the red dice rolled across the baize.

Casinos like to control just how quickly gamblers can ruin themselves. The conventional wisdom is that a slow drain is superior to the sudden flush. The house wants you to lose just enough that you’ll come back and lose again tomorrow. Casinos therefore limit the amount you’re able to bet on a single game—usually no more than $10,000. The table limit protects the house’s interest—if the gambler happens to win, it isn’t always easy to come up with that much cash—while restraining those recklessly seeking the ecstasy of Zarathustra, like moths to the flame.

But not Binion’s. At the Horseshoe Casino, none of the usual limits applied. Away from the touristic Vegas Strip, in the downtown area called Glitter Gulch, the Horseshoe was known as a gambler’s gambling joint. Its regular customers, said one dealer, were all “tough monkeys and weirdos” with names like Silent Harry, Texas Dolly, and the Kid. There was a hotel, but no luxury suites, no spa, no swimming pool. The dealers wore blue jeans. “We got a little joint and a big bankroll,” said the founder Benny Binion, “and all them others got a big joint and a little bankroll.” The “sky’s the limit” policy was one of the Horseshoe’s signatures. And to prove the house was good for it, Binion encased a million bucks in an enormous plastic horseshoe and put it on permanent display, as if it were extraneous.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review
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