Stiffs and Georges

I can visit the Fremont Street Experience anytime I want, for free. So can guests at any Downtown hotel … except the Golden Nugget. In a vile new variation on the “resort fee” phenomenon, owner Tilman Fertitta is now tacking on a bullshit, $5 tariff called a “Fremont Street Experience fee,” for which you can [...]

Foxwoods Resort Casino CEO Scott “Woody” Butera didn’t close the sale with Milford voters earlier this week, but they didn’t slam the door on him either. Rather than prejudice the issue with a town-meeting vote, local sentiment favors a city-wide referendum. Although casino opponents have dominated the argument so far, hearing from Foxwoods-in-Milford supporters seems [...]

Historians bicker over the incorporation date of Las Vegas. Some say it happened as late as June 1, 1911. Others argue for May 15, 1905. Golden Gate owner Derek Stevens, opting for the earlier benchmark, has had his employees digging through the files for a gallery of images from the good old days. Fremont Street [...]

After a boffo February, the Silver State also posted extraordinary numbers in March. As Deutsche Bank headlined its report, “Different Month, Same Tune.” Analyst Carlo Santarelli cautioned, “we believe the underlying trends are not as strong as the headline would suggest,” pointing toward slippage in slot handle and in table drop (down 10.5%), excluding baccarat. [...]

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… gets shipped to California. It certainly adds an element of color to your next visit to the Plaza, adjacent to the Las Vegas bus depot.

Break out a flagon of whatever Derek Stevens is drinking and put it on my tab, lads. To commemorate the first leg of the Triple Crown, he’s holding a May 3-4 Sigma Derby tournament. Buy-in starts at $50, so starting emptying your piggy banks for some of the best time-on-device action in Las Vegas. To [...]

S&G contributor Jeff_in_OKC has been reading the entrails of the recent demise of the Gold Spike (which had seemed to be doing so much better under Spiegel Group) and sees cause for hope. Other nearby casinos weren’t slow to court ex-Gold Spike employees, by the way. Jeff assembles the pieces of the theoretical strategy and [...]

No sooner had I confidently predicted that Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh (whoops, wrong Tony) would not be making any gaming related purchased when the shoe mogul pounced on the financially troubled Gold Spike. Showing the acumen that’s made him the most-admired magnate in town (yes, even more than Steve Wynn), Hsieh snapped up the note [...]

Uh-oh. This is not good. Tamares Group is going to cease taking room bookings at the Vegas Club. In an ominous phrase, it’s “evaluating its options” for the hotel-casino, whose gambling floor and other amenities are but a pallid shadow of what competing properties, even Tamares’ own Plaza, have to offer. It’s basically dead without [...]

One doesn’t really think of going to shore in March, so it’s no surprise that Atlantic City casino revenues were — excluding Revel — down 14% last month. The latter grossed $10 million, pulling it almost dead even with the Golden Nugget and a bit further behind the Atlantic Club. The surprise bulletin of the [...]

Yeah, Beyoncé is a hard act to follow but who knew that Revel would fall so far, so fast? So enjoy this brief moment when things looked so very promising* …  in the meantime, I’m running down leads on some oldies but goodies: the

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than right: When Tamares Group made an indiscriminate splurge on downtown Las Vegas real estate in 2004, it was banking on a construction boom that never took place. It also found itself with several casinos and slot-route locations for which it never had any strategy. But Tamares sure was [...]

Revel Atlantic City’s day of deliverance is at hand: CEO Kevin DeSanctis has been ousted, along with Chief Investment Officer Michael Garrity. But there’s no need to shed tears over their fate. They will continue “developing amenity projects” for Revel (since they’ve done such a bang-up job to date) and will retain their sinecures with [...]

If you’ll pardon my vulgarity, shit got real while I was tied up with other projects. Last week’s sale of excess baggage Dania Jai-Alai in Florida was just a tiny prelude to this morning’s blockbuster: Echelon is kaput. Instead, Boyd Gaming will liquidate it to Genting Berhad for $350 million. This closes the book on Boyd’s [...]

Ixnay those Binion’s Gambling Hall-closure rumors. Owner Terry Caudill rang up Anthony Curtis to say that it’s (mostly) business as usual at the Downtown fixture. “Neither the casino nor the steakhouse is closing,” he told Curtis. “We have minor projects slated for the summer, but they’re all positive improvements and there will be no [...]

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 [...]

Just when Sam Nazarian’s mooted reinvention of the defunct Sahara as SLS Las Vegas looked dead and gone, The Naz slipped in under the wire with all the offshore money he required and a bit more: Sahara Sam needs $115 million from overseas sources to hang onto $300 million that’s sitting in escrow. He told [...]

Some of you — and you know who you are — get to Las Vegas several times a year but rarely have the chance to foray far past either the Las Vegas Strip or Downtown. (It’s the same with me and the greatest place on Earth, Manhattan: There’s a well-worn groove through the middle of [...]

It’s not clear what Lady Luck owner Andrew B. Donner has on his mind but he’s been gobbling up obscure little hotels over on the east side of Downtown. It’s out past the defunct Western casino, so we’re talking way off the beaten path. The Dragon Hotel, at 117 N. 9th Street was Donner’s latest [...]

There’s no other way of saying it (although many are trying). Strip casinos got their clocks cleaned in November as Lady Luck favored the punters, not the house. A 13% dropoff on the Strip was driven by a perfect storm of factors. Sports books relearned the old lesson that it’s not whether you won or [...]