Benny Binion's Original World Series

The World Series of Poker continues to gain in popularity with each passing year thanks to the main event wins of Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer in 2003 and 2004. The history of the event, however, stretches back to 1970, the year when the first World Series of Poker was played. If you’ve ever wondered how the event came about, or who participated in it, then keep reading.

A History of the World Series Of Poker: Johnny "The Grand Old Man of Poker" Moss - Winner of the Main Event 1970, 1971 & 1974 - Online Poker by Dany Willis on June 10, 2013

Recounting the birth and highlights from the early years of the World Series of Poker Main Event (1970-1979); first of a five-part series.

The 1970 World Series of Poker was hosted at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, and it was quite different from the WSOP we know today. Benny Binion invited the very best poker players to come to Las Vegas and determine the world champion through open competition. Binion hoped to improve upon the Texas Gamblers Reunion he had attended the year before in Reno, Nevada, and he also hoped to once again capture the public’s imagination with poker the way he had 19 years earlier during the heads-up match between Johnny Moss and Nick “The Greek” Dandalos. The Horseshoe did not have a poker room when Binion’s decided to host its first tournament, so one was erected for the event, despite its intrusion on valuable gaming floor real estate. The first WSOP lineup included legends Moss, Doyle Brunson, “Amarillo Slim” Preston, “Puggy” Pearson, “Sailor” Roberts, Jack “Treetop” Straus, Bill Boyd, “Titanic” Thompson, Jimmy Casella, Crandell Addington, and a handful of other players. They played a number of card games over the next three days, including five-card stud and draw, seven-card stud, seven-card stud ...

The World Series of Poker was first held in 1970.[1] Unlike the WSOP events that followed it, which are decided using a freeze-out tournament, the 1970 champion was decided from a vote by the players. Jack Binion invited the best seven poker players in America to his Binion's Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas, Nevada to decide who was America's best poker player.

Benny Binion, father of the WSOP, was a man of many contradictions: wise but illiterate, a marketing genius who always told the truth. Generous to his friends, hospitable to his customers and dangerous to his enemies, Johnny Hughes remembers Binion through his own words.

The newspaper men and photographers fell in love with the wrinkly moon-faced cowboy named Benny Binion, playing host at his Horseshoe Casino, the literal grandfather of a new poker tournament called the World Series of Poker, shaking everyone’s hands. It was the way he talked and the way he moved. He had credibility as a real Texas operator, a genuine person in a world of fakes and schemers. Although, earlier in his life, the media attention nearly got him killed several times, things have changed so drastically he paid for the media’s airfare to cover his WSOP. If Nick “the Greek” Dandolos was the Prince of Vegas in those early years (a man who would “put a snake in your pocket and ask for a match”, Binion said), then good old Lester “Benny” Binion was the saloon owner who only pretended to be dumb when, in fact, he was, most often, the smartest man in the city. And if someone wanted to argue, Binion didn’t keep snakes in his pockets. Just ask the ghosts of Frank Boldin and Ben Frieden, ...

Lester Ben "Benny" Binion (November 20, 1904 – December 25, 1989) was an American gambling icon and mob boss.