Question of the Day - 13 July 2024

Yesterday, we traced Four Queens' owner Terry Caudill's story from Nampa, Idaho, to accounting school at UNR and an 11-year stint managing the accounting department at Circus Circus. Today, we continue from there. 

After Circus Circus, Caudill was ready for a fresh challenge. He’d already been building toward it.

“By the end of ’94, I'd acquired three bars, so I decided to pursue the bar business full time. We got up to 15 bars. I also bought land and built an office building with 100,000 square feet of space. I thought I could retire and collect rent and tried that for a while. But it was boring. I loved the excitement of the casino business, the day-to-day hustle and bustle and seeing the people. So I sold the office building and used the profits for my down payment on the Four Queens."

So no, Skinny Dugan’s and Magoo’s didn’t monetize Caudill’s entry into downtown, as the question surmises.

Why the Four Queens? “Because I didn’t have a billion dollars to buy Bellagio," Caudill quips. "The truth is I loved downtown. The Four Queens was available and I could actually afford it. The Four Queens is full service, with everything a casino has, but it’s also small enough that I can handle it and not be completely overwhelmed. I bought the Four Queens on August 1, 2003."

Caudill found a casino in foreclosure and “a mess.” Every department had to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb. New carpeting, new equipment, and a conversion from coin-out slots to TITO soon followed. 

“Ticket-in ticket-out allowed us to save a lot of money on payroll. We’re always looking at ways to save money, to do things cheaper through innovation and technology. All the profits we made the first three years went right back into the Four Queens. We took a property that was making about $5 million EBITDA and went up to $12 million fairly quickly.”

After a couple of years at the Four Queens, another downtown casino came into Caudill’s life. Binion’s Horseshoe had been stripped of its gambling license due to mismanagement and Harrah’s stepped in briefly, flipping it (minus the Horseshoe brand and the World Series of Poker) to West Virginia-based MTR Gaming. But as Caudill explains, one can’t run a casino from clear across the continent. The ownership has to be hands-on. 

“In 2007, which was the best year this city had ever seen up to that point, Binion's lost money,” Caudill recalls. “When I looked at their numbers, I knew we could trim literally a million dollars a month off expenses.’ And we did.”

However, scarcely had the sale closed in March 2008 when Las Vegas and the rest of the country were hit with the Great Recession. Caudill had managed to complete a $7 million renovation of the casino floor and other public areas, but now had to hunker down in what he calls “bunker mode."

By 2009, "The rooms were bleeding money so badly we had to close them down, in hopes of reopening them soon. They had a coffee shop that was very famous for $2 steak dinners, but they were losing $2.5 million a year, so we had to close the coffee shop. But the casino floor continued to do well and a lot of people were surprised we were able to keep the property open, rather than shut it down or lose it during the recession.”

To this day, the 300-room hotel tower remains closed. Caudill did manage to reopen the historic (and haunted) 80-room Apache Hotel. And the hits keep on coming. The casino owner has just discovered that he needs to redo all the hotel product at the Four Queens, so those rooms will soon be offline for a year or more.

Part of Caudill’s reason for buying the former Horseshoe was nostalgic. Benny Binion, he says, “really knew what was going on. He had a nefarious reputation. That’s fine. But we wanted the good parts of what did, his philosophy: good food and a good gamble. We try to carry on that same philosophy. Give ‘em a chance to win. Benny Binion was famous for taking any size bet. We’re not quite like that. But we do try to give the gambler a very very fair shot at winning.”

It’s thinking like that — and his adamant opposition to resort fees — that has endeared Caudill to many. But he's not exactly resting on his laurels. He recently introduced a miniaturized version of his old game, craps, using a smaller table and half the dealing staff. Whether or not it catches on, it certainly gained the Four Queens some welcome publicity.

Nor does he entertain any thoughts, even at age 76, of retirement. Trying it once seemed to get that out of his system.

“There’re always unrealized things to do. I come back to that interaction of math and psychology, one of the most fascinating things I've ever encountered. People ask, ‘Why don’t you retire?’ I say, ‘Why would I? I love coming to work. I look forward to it."

Still, he's cut down his workload to three days a week over the last few years. "Thursday and Saturday are my golf days. Friday’s an errand day and Sunday is devoted to sports. I love fantasy sports. I did the first fantasy football draft in the late '70s at Harrah’s up in Reno, long before the Internet.

“Anyway,” the mogul concludes, “I’ve had a very rounded life. Work is an extremely valuable part of it, but it’s not all of it. I also have other hobbies, but I really really like coming to work. I like the people I work with. I like the customers. I like the interaction. I can tell you, there’s always — always! — something to do here to make things a little bit better. It never gets old. As long as I can physically come to work, I plan on working.”