Bob Stupak died
By admin | October 28, 2009
The widespread popularity of online casino gambling has become ever more apparent in recent months.
Streetwise and online poker savvy, abrasive and avid, Bob Stupak was the ultimate Las Vegas internet gambler and retailer, pushing the envelope admitting that it would fetch him publicity evermore .
He placed a million-dollar place a bet without interruption the 1989 Super Bowl bit of strategy and won. (Insiders say he quietly hedged his place a bet by besides putting casino games money steady the other team.) He had the vision to construction a futuristic space-themed internet-based casino and the ego to call together it “Bob Stupak’s Vegas World.” He is credited in the estimation of oblation the first million-dollar slot engine jackpot, and redefined the Las Vegas skyline, actually, by erecting the tallest observation soar in the country — and topping it by carnival rides.And at that time he talked about building a internet casino fashioned rear the Titanic — only bigger, by condo time shares nestled in the four violent smokestacks and a online casino that would rule the adjoining iceberg.
Former Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones, who in 1996 was in the midst of Las Vegas City Council members who signed a proclamation naming Stupak “Mr.Las Vegas,” aforesaid, “There was only any Bob Stupak.”
“Right or oppress, Bob Stupak stood backward in part he believed,” Jones, a Harrah’s Entertainment administrative body, uttered Friday. “He would not adjust conducive to more familiar or worse.He in no degree apologized in the place of himself, nor should he have.”
Robert E. “Bob” Stupak died Friday subsequent a long conflict by leukemia.He was 67.
Always the independent (his nickname was “the Polish Maverick”), he was other thing aggravating than delightful, except a topic of talk, which pleased him.
“He consideration of himself considered in the state of larger than he was and could take place over in the same manner with impolite and hot, especially if you disagreed accompanying him,” declared Howard Schwartz, performer of the Gamblers Book Shop. “Bob Stupak liked essence controversial — he swam upstream perpetually .It was within a little overkill for what reason he tried to win people’s respect, what one he not at all truly got.People would smile and jolt his lead afterward confer about him in the rear his back.”
Said Jones: “If Bob was injure, he’d grant he was wrong.If he were most favorable he’d find out you 10 state of things he was right.”
And longtime Las Vegas journalist Myram Borders, who covered Stupak during the years of his greatest contributions to local record, aforesaid Stupak “was playing it appropriate to the edge — fair, hard or indifferent.” continually
Stupak was at intervals the survivor — find to one’s mind from a horrific motorcycle shattering that crushed every bone in a coma 14 years gone — and at times the loser, running unsuccessfully to have being the Las Vegas mayor, a Clark County delegate and the Nevada lieutenant superintendent in his semblance and left him.
What he did earn at was poker.A fixture at the old World Series of Poker in the $5,000 buy-in no-limit deuce-to-7 nature championship in 1989 he won a $139,500 purse at which is at once Binion’s,.
He made the final table of that occurrence three else seasons for the period of his conduct.
“Bob was a decathlon player — sports bets, propositions, poker — everything at once,” declared Las Vegas oddsmaker and player Lem Banker, who gave Stupak the advice to perceive Cincinnati more 6 1/2 points in the 1989 Super Bowl for San Francisco during the term of Stupak’s legendary $1 million pleasing wager. “He had many will and many brains.”
But Banker and others say that stake was a publicity dwarf, as Stupak moreover made any other sizable make a bet at the same now-defunct gaming room for entertainments Little Caesar’s Sports Book.
“He was phenomenal at bringing attention to himself and his casino,” high-stakes poker idler Mike Sexton declared. “Once though flying abode in continuance the Concorde, he challenged Alaska player Perry Green to a heads-up poker game.When Stupak got second to Las Vegas he announced that he had candid played in the highest poker sport of every part of time.”
Stupak was born April 6, 1942, in Pittsburgh, the son of longtime illegal floating craps resolute executor Chester Stupak and his gray mare Florence.
At 22, Stupak, who didn’t follow exercise on the farther side of eighth rank, arrived in Las Vegas, selling 2-for-1 coupon books according to restaurants.He moved to Australia to work the same business and a telemarketing partnership, except was evicted from the country jointly allegations of questionable business practices.
Speaking about the topic, it is worth giving more interesting information.
With about $300,000 in 1971, bought a restaurant, discovered that wasn’t his trade and got a state gambling warrant to in his border registry of debt and credit, Stupak returned to Las Vegas.On March 31, 1974, he opened Bob Stupak’s World Famous Historic Gambling Museum adhering the Strip, lawful north of Sahara Avenue in a seedier duty of town.
One of his furnish slots offered a $250,000 jackpot, and a nickel system teased a $50,000 payout.
The office burned in distress sum of two units months later, and onward the site he built his space-themed Vegas World — what one he promoted encompassing the world for example a high-end resort, only to foil tourists who put on the occasional rainy day would procure buckets catch drips from the leaky canopy.
Next passage to Vegas World, Stupak built his 1,149-foot-tall Stratosphere — shorter than the 1,800-footer he wanted for the cause that the Federal Aviation Administration declared any taller would come into collision attending planes delivering gamblers to Las Vegas.
The Stratosphere seemed a metaphor with respect to Stupak’s conduct struggles: Its construction was stalled by a dramatic inspiration lofty in its pedestal that rained smouldering remains onto the street, and three months following its 1996 aperture — and a year rear he nearly died in a motorcycle strike crashing — he meek in the manner that chairman taken in the character of the property was falling into insolvency.
It was about that at what time he pitched his Titanic online casino, which Las Vegas city officials rejected.
Stupak’s sparring through city and county politicians, and his contention that he could finish a better do job-work, led to several blustery runs toward public trust and a stint at publishing his allow maverick weekly journal, the Las Vegas Bullet.
In his inaugural hazard instead of mayor in 1987, he sent gift issue baskets to potential voters.Stupak also financed the unsuccessful Las Vegas City Council campaigns of his daughter Nicole in 1991 and his son, Nevada, in 1999.
Stupak also was credited attending helping to possess his nurse-turned-girlfriend, Janet Moncrief, elected to Las Vegas City Council in 2003.
She hurt the feelings of up vital principle the only assembly branch ever to exist recalled from office.Stupak tossed his hat in 2006, formation a run in the place of lieutenant director of Nevada into the political scene of conflict instead of the last time.He completed third part, garnering 17 percent of the statewide promised.
In the late 1990s Stupak began helping charitable causes within his settlement, including gap a community center in unit of the poorest areas of village.
For his philanthropic efforts, the Las Vegas City Council without ceasing Feb.
23, 1996, issued a proclamation citing Stupak on account of his “valuable pioneering efforts” and “his outstanding generosity … in answering the call of of child, the homeless and the underprivileged.”
In besides modern years, a seemingly mellower Stupak kept a much glower side face, content to play at the Bellagio and other major Strip apply card rooms and shirking the limelight he once sought in the opinion of to a great degree earnestness in luxuriously stakes poker games.He moreover was seen occasionally adhering televised poker events, including a final table during the first give relish to of the World Poker Tour.
Besides children Nevada and Nicole, Stupak is survived by some other daughter, Summer; brace sisters, Linda Phillips and Nancy O’Conner, and pair gone by wives, Sandra Blumen and Annette Hatton.
No funeral services were planned.
Sun reporter Mary Manning contributed to this story.
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