It remains one of the most iconic photos ever taken of gambling in Las Vegas. And it’s fake news.

“Customers at the Sands playing craps on a floating table in the pool,” reads the description for the photo in the UNLV Special Collections archive. “About 2,200 guests tried this in 1954.”

Very few words in that statement are true.

According to UNLV’s description, the information was transcribed from the original photo’s sleeve. This makes perfect sense if that’s how the photo was originally captioned when it was mailed out for newspaper wire services to run without fact-checking.

And that’s why many social media sites and websites today refer to the Sands’ floating craps table as an “experiment” that lasted a year or so but didn’t work out. Some claim the Sands had floating blackjack and roulette as well, and that other resorts followed suit.

Even the Las Vegas Review-Journal—in an Aug. 29, 2017 article—repeated the unsubstantiated claims that “in-pool gaming has been around since at least the 1950s” and that “the Sands and the Dunes were the first to offer it.”

What a Pool Believes

More than 73 years after this series of photographs was staged, not one other shot has ever surfaced showing a session with different players enjoying what would have certainly been the single most photogenic gambling experience in Las Vegas history.

In fact, it’s highly unlikely that a real game of craps was played in the Sands pool even during the shoot. (If you wondered how the players kept their cash from getting wet, bonus points for you!)

According to historian Larry Gragg, writing in the Spring 2008 Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, the floating craps game was cooked up by Sands publicity director Al Freeman.

On June 30, 1953, Freeman had a real craps table placed in the Sands pool, then recruited patrons and dressed the stickmen in their traditional eyeshades and arm garters before bringing everyone outside for the photograph.

Freeman’s most famous publicity stunt was inspired by the song “Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game,” featured in the Broadway hit Guys and Dolls. (“Floating” in the song referred to a game changing locations to evade authorities, not to its swimming-pool buoyancy.)

Please enjoy Frank Sinatra singing it in the 1955 movie version:

Las Vegas News Bureau photographers snapped several photos, and a myth was born.

Full of Craps

This was a photoshoot engineered to generate worldwide publicity for Las Vegas by showing how differently things operated here. And, as with so many other stories Sin City has told about itself, the truth was optional.

The Las Vegas News Bureau was created in 1948 by the publicity firm of Steve Hannagan and Associates for the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, its client. It was originally called the Desert Sea News Bureau, the “news bureau” part being a total charade. The organization was tasked with selling Las Vegas, not serving as a pillar of journalistic integrity.

This was the same organization that also staged the photo of the famous Sands “showgirl tram” that never existed, yet is also still claimed to have been real in its current description on the UNLV Special Collections site. (Click here to read that “Vegas Myths Busted” column.)

In 1955, the Chamber brought the “news bureau” in house, changing its name so that every published photo credit would put the words “Las Vegas” in print. Since 1992, the Las Vegas News Bureau has existed only as an archive maintained by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Life Imitates Photography

In 1981, the Tropicana opened two swim-up blackjack tables. It wasn’t the tables that floated this time but the players, who waded toward stools bolted to the bottom of the indoor pool grotto. The dealers worked in a dry pit.

Unlike the Sands’ floating craps table, however, this was a thing that happened in real life.

And that leads us to our smoking gun: the March 14, 1986 issue of the Las Vegas Israelite, the local Jewish newspaper founded in 1965 by former Las Vegas Sun staffer Jack Tell and his wife, Beatrice.

In describing the Tropicana’s offering, the newspaper wrote: “Not since the late 1950s when one Strip hotel experimented with a ‘floating craps game’ that actually took place in the pool (it was used only once for publicity purposes), has there been such excitement over a variation in the normally dry game of blackjack.”

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