The Money Shot

Every chance I get, I take a walk downtown, step into Binion's and get my picture taken with a million bucks. If I can't look like a million bucks, I can at least look like I'm standing near a million bucks. It takes half an hour for your photo to be processed, so in the meantime you canamble around Binion's or go wandering up and down Fremont Street checking out the sights (or, in my case, using coupons for a free beer or breakfast wrap). (Or scouring the streets for loose change.) When your picture's ready you can go pick it up by looking for it in the stacks of pictures waiting at the Player's Club desk. This is one of my favorite parts of the process, because you get to look at all the pictures everyone else took and see how they posed. One classic shot had three burly guys about to come to blows over the money while their diminutive friend frantically tried to play peacemaker in the middle.

I've been doing this for a while, and some old-timers might remember that Back In The Day, the million dollars was in the form of an uncut sheet of $10,000 bills that hung in a glass case along one wall. This was before those wacky Binion kids inherited the place and, I guess, ran it into the ground, because years later a vendor outside the World Series of Poker was selling what he claimed was one of the $10,000 bills from the famed "Binion's Sheet." Who sells an uncut sheet of $10,000 bills so someone can break it up? Those same wacky Binion kids who ended up having to sell the casino to someone who only wanted it for the rights to the WSOP, that's sho.