Question of the Day - 22 September 2022

The Continental Hotel-Casino, today, is called Silver Sevens. It's located on the southeast corner of the intersection of E. Flamingo and Paradise roads. 

It debuted in 1975 on 10 acres, built to take advantage of its location as the closest casino to the airport. It opened with 200 rooms, then doubled in size in 1979 when another 200 rooms were added.

It was a good locals joint from the start, with strong ongoing food and gambling specials. In April 1983, for example, it was listed in one of the first Las Vegas Advisor Top Tens for its complete lobster-tail dinner available round the clock for $4.49. That ranks, in our view, as one of the best Las Vegas meal deals of all time. It was still available more than 10 years later, though the price went up over the years to $9.99.

Anthony Curtis remembers going to the Continental for a triple-pay-for-blackjack promotion in his gambling days in the '80s. He called it "one of the biggest gatherings of scufflers I ever saw -- almost a convention of people on the unofficial exclusion list. I couldn't get a seat."

And in Anthony’s book Bargain City, he wrote about a good video poker promotion in 1993: Ladies were paid double for 4-of-a-kinds on Tuesday nights.

The Continental made the news in March 1984 when, on a Saturday afternoon, a grease fire in the kitchen forced the evacuation of 400 patrons from the dining room and casino. Only a few blocks and a few years away from the deadly MGM Grand fire, it was a big media event, though no one was injured and the fire was quickly contained. The hotel wasn’t evacuated.

The lounge occasionally had surprisingly worthwhile acts. For a long time, it was Cook E. Jarr's home away from home. And this writer remembers being stunned one night in the mid-1990s when he walked in on some errand or other and saw Tiny Tim performing for 10 people in the lounge. Being a fan of the eccentric but talented singer-ukelele player (we also share a birthday), that was quite an unexpected treat.

As a strange aside, we did find that the Continental was used as the basis for a UNLV study about whether or not the cycle of the moon affected people's luck. (Bizarrely, the study found that four of the five major jackpots won between 1991 and 1994 at the Continental occurred during a full moon, which, according to one of the study's co-authors, had a statistical chance of 1 in 22 million of happening by chance.)

The Continental fell on hard times in the last '90s, unable to compete against the Boyds and Stations. It went bankrupt in 1998 and it was foreclosed on in 1999.

That same year, the Continental was sold by American Realty Trust, a Dallas-based real-estate investment company. ART was founded in 1961, so it’s conceivable that it was the original developer of the Continental. We couldn’t verify this, but it makes sense to us for two reasons. First, there’s no record of it being sold until 1999, so the seller was likely the original owner. Second, corporations had been allowed to own casinos since 1969 and this was the era when forward-thinking developers and hotel companies saw opportunities in Las Vegas.

Anyway, ART sold the joint to the Herbst family. The Herbsts closed it, completely refurbished it (the cost to buy and renovate totaled $65 million), and reopened it in November 2000. They also renamed it Terrible's, which put the last nail in the Continental's coffin.

A new hotel tower with 100 rooms was added in 2007. Another renovation was completed in early 2013 on an investment of $7 million. In 2013, the name was changed again, to the Silver Sevens that it remains today.