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for those that can remember that far back, there used to be only 4 or 5 different bookmaking shops that booked horses and sports.. the joints were named after racetracks like Churchill Downs and Santa Anita.
I remembered walking into Harry Gordon's Churchill Downs for the first time in the early 1970s and bet on a baseball game. I went to the window and bet a game $750 to win $500. I won the bet and went back to cash the ticket and they took out 10% of the win for federal taxes. I went to an old-timer that I knew was a casino host at the Stardust and he hooked me up with Churchill Downs and I got classified as a VIP player. what that was is that you could go to the window and bet $1000 but they only wrote the ticket up for $100 and they wrote the letter "R" on the bottom of the ticket. so now I only paid the tax on the $100 and not the $1000. they did the same thing for me with the horse bets. eventually, the federal taxes got lowered to what it still is today, .25 of the initial bet. with that and laws that passed in Nevada that only granted race and sportsbook licenses to places that had hotel rooms brought the bookmaking shops to the large hotels. by the mid-'90s there were no free-standing race and sportsbooks in Las Vegas.
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