Stiffs and Georges

Penn National Gaming has filed paperwork with the SEC for an IPO that would enable you to buy into 19 Penn casinos, including flop Hollywood Perryville (shown). This Penn stalking horse would go by the incredibly generic name of Gaming & Leisure Properties (ticker symbol GLPI), a moniker so dull it must have been conceived [...]

One of gaming’s biggest new markets went out with a whimper, not a bang, when colorful Toronto Mayor Rob Ford nixed a scheduled vote on whether to put a casino in the lakeside city, hoping to extract a $97 million “hosting fee” from Ontario. Faced with probable defeat, the measure was pulled, leaving all the [...]

Although the financial backing of Genting Group would — under normal circumstances — make the Mashpee Wampanoags prohibitive favorites for a casino in southeastern Massachusetts, these are anything but normal conditions. The tribe still doesn’t have a compact with the state, its site reposes on land that’s not been taken into trust and the Mashpee [...]

That’s what it could come to in Boston, if mayoral candidate — and current Suffolk County D.A. — Daniel Conley gets his wish. Rather than simply letting East Boston vote up or down on Caesars Entertainment’s proposed conversion of Suffolk Downs into a $1 billion racino, Conley would require it to get both citywide and [...]

So, as Ohio marks the first full year of casino play, is the glass half-full or half-empty. Currently, much is being made of Horseshoe Cleveland having brought in less than half of greatly over-ambitious expectations (and 12% less than what Moody’s Investor Service anticipated). And that isn’t even the fault of Rock Gaming Caesars but [...]

It was one of the stupefying follies of the Caesars Entertainment LBO that CEO Gary Loveman believed the company could take on $30 billion in debt and continue to expand. Even as he tries to reshuffle old assets into new IPOs, Loveman is finally coming around to what some of us knew years ago: The [...]

It’s a longstanding tradition in Iowa that voters, once they’ve voted to approve a casino in their county, never have second thoughts. Selling non-gaming counties on new casinos, however, is a different story. Take Norwalk County, for instance, where a casino proposal only mustered 39% support. One opponent is perfectly accurate: The Wild Rose-sponsored project [...]

America’s casino officially emerged from the doldrums with the release of the American Gaming Association’s yearly survey, showing a 5% increase in private-sector casino revenue, just $200 million shy of 2007’s record amount. Mind you, we have quite a few more casinos now than we did in ‘07, so the pie much be sliced more [...]

Yes, the recovery in Las Vegas could be said to be a chastened and limping one. The national press will leap at just about anything to restart the “Vegas is back” narrative. And yes, CityCenter ROI improved exponentially … to 4%. But all that being the case, nothing seen in recent numbers — like a [...]

Yes, the comedy is finished in Springfield, at least for the moment. In an episode worthy of The Simpsons and after an epic amount of foot-dragging, Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno was cajoled and ultimately browbeaten into actually taking a stand on which gambling company will get the city’s nod to build a resort downtown. And [...]

Pricewaterhouse Coopers, accountant to the stars — and Las Vegas Sands — tendered its resignation last week, news that Sands kept carefully under wraps until after the markets closed on Friday. After a brief, initial shock, Sands shares went back to trading as usual. J.P. Morgan analyst Joseph Greff explained the rupture thusly: “we think [...]

“Slot machines and blackjack tables have no power at all. What we are not building is a box of slots. We’re building a beautiful hotel that just happens to have a gaming room in the back.”– Steve Wynn, repositioning himself as an urban hotelier in the course of unveiling a $1.2 billion, proposed casino [...]

If you have been waiting for the moment to sell your Caesars Entertainment stock and get out unscathed, even making a tidy profit, that moment is now. Actually, it was March 20 this year, when CZR hit an all-time high of $17.54, gently sloping off thereafter. That continued an impressive comeback for a stock that’s [...]

Stephen Sweeney (D, right), president of the New Jersey state senate, has the honor of having been the first to call for ex-Revel CEO Kevin DeSanctis‘ head on a platter. Garden State regulators moved quickly to put Mohegan Sun veteran Jeffrey Hartmann in DeSanctis’ place, while the latter and colleague Michael Garrity sail away on [...]

Today’s top story is the rumor, first aired on LasVegasAdvisor.com that Binion’s Gambling Hall & Hotel will close in July, lock, stock and million-dollar display. This dovetails with an earlier report that a detailed makeover is in the works. So Binion’s could follow the lead of the Plaza and go the short-term-closure route, rather than [...]

French statesman Georges Clemenceau once dryly remarked that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men. Clemenceau’s quip obtained fresh sting this week when the gaming world lost Dr. William Eadington. The industry scholar has been struggling with cancer for a year and a half, and succumbed at age 67. A reserved and unpretentious man, Bill [...]

MGM Resorts International has a 50% stake in Borgata that nobody wants … except MGM. In bolstering move that Atlantic City sorely needs, MGM may get to reclaim its half of the resort (with the support of partner Boyd Gaming), not to mention all the revenue that the State of New Jersey has been holding [...]

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) loves to veto Internet gambling bills so much that he’s just done it for a second time. There was incremental progress: In punting the ball to the Legislature’s one-yard line, Christie endorsed the idea of Internet gambling, just not in the form that reached his desk. He wants a [...]

That idyllic scene above is not Massachusetts but Vermont. However, the Green Mountain State is not only shaped like a funnel, it is one, an untapped market just waiting to be drained by whichever casino lands the coveted western Massachusetts concession, even it might have to wait until 2016 or even 2018. (A couple of [...]

It may have taken time for Gary Loveman’s chickens to come home to roost but they’re doing it by the flockful. To raise cash, pronto, Caesars Entertainment — which hasn’t turned a profit in over three years — has piled several random assets into wishfully named entity Caesars Growth Venture Partners, in which it would [...]