Bob Stupak’s Vegas World Opened on Friday July 13, 1974
Vegas World was a casino/hotel opened in 1979 on Las Vegas Boulevard owned and operated by Bob Stupak. It was also signed as Bob Stupak’s Vegas World.
Stupak bought the land on which he would eventually build Vegas World with money he raised himself and from his father’s friends. On March 31, 1974, he built a small slot joint called Bob Stupak’s World Famous Historic Gambling Museum. Although, on May 21, the place burned down when an air conditioner caught fire.
After the fire he managed to persuade Valley Bank to lend him more than $1 million to complete what would be known as Vegas World. Vegas World opened on Friday, July 13, 1979 with 102 rooms, with the motto “The Sky’s The Limit”. Bob Stupak developed weird and original rules for traditional games, like double exposure 21, where the dealer would deal both of his card face up. Another of his successful promotions was his direct-mail coupons offering value packages, and his ad were often seen in the back pages of magazines like the National Enquirer.
At its peak, Vegas World made $100 million a year in gambling revenues.
Vegas World is remembered by some as one of Vegas’s most unusual and quirky casinos. Vegas World closed on February 1, 1995, in order to make room for its successor, the Stratosphere, Stupak’s dream project. Stupak died in September 2009.
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The coupon books with which Stupak flooded the mailboxes of the country seemed to show knowledgable casino games players that they could make a profitable trip to Las Vegas and back, even paying their own airfare and hotel room costs, by playing classic casino games at Vegas World while they were there. When they got there, they found that Vegas World was actually offering it’s own, as the author of the article called them, weird, versions of the classic casino games, with their own weird rules, which Stupak had invented, which existed in no other casino on earth, and which made the coupons worthless. If internet access on the average person’s home computer and cell phone, and websites like yelp warning potential customers from around the country about conmen with business licenses like Stupak, had existed then, his Vegas World, if he’d even dared to try to operate such a borderline fraud, would probably have been going bankrupt, then torched for the insurance money, I mean, um, have become the unfortunate victim of a defective air conditioner, around as quickly as his weird museum had.