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 [...]

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 [...]

We don’t know how it managed it but congratulations to The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. It finally realized how to market to those hitherto-elusive creatures known as “gamblers.” Casino revenue shot up 33%, winning $41 million from players, partly due to better-than-expected hold. Room rates ($273) and 88% also continued to be some of the [...]

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 [...]

Hey, if you had an albatross the size of Caesars Entertainment slung around your neck, you’d be understandably subject to skepticism and perhaps even being called out in public, perhaps to the point of getting tetchy about it. That’s the plight of Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert. The latter has his thumb in casino pies [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Our question for the day is, “Who benefits?” Taking the long view of Caesars Entertainment to bundle a mixed bag of Planet Hollywood, its-casino-to-be in Baltimore and Caesars Interactive, in whose interest is it to purchase minority stakes, since CEO Gary Loveman intends to maintain majority control. Or, in the case of his Maryland casino, [...]

“The twilight’s last reaming”?!?!? Christina Aguilera said it, I didn’t.
Of all the proposition bets being made on Sunday’s “Big Game” (the favored Vegas euphemism), my favorite is how long it will take Alicia Keys to crawl through the National Anthem. Admittedly, Jennifer Hudson’s Wagnerian 2:10, at 2009’s Super Bowl, gives Keys a high bar to [...]

Penn National Gaming trimmed its 2013 revenue projections today by 3% — not surprising, given the “headwinds” represented by recent tax changes that will eat into Americans’ discretionary income. Sluggish early slot performance in the Columbus and Toledo markets was blamed on a lack of marketing and comping “into underpenetrated submarkets,” as Joseph Greff of [...]

“[W]ell-connected developer” — but so not well financed — David Nunes (below) just got his casino-application fee across the transom, meaning that there are 11 contestants vying for two casino licenses and a slot parlor in Massachusetts. A couple of casino aspirants who couldn’t get their act together in time are pleading for extensions That [...]

Ohio casinos had a below-average December, although the blow was softened by table hold of — YEOW! — 23%. That’s borderline-astronomical compared to Las Vegas averages for 2004-2011 period. It’ll help make up for slot revenues that suggest, with six racinos and one full-service casino still to come, the Buckeye State market isn’t what it [...]

Although the government of Macao enjoys nothing better than to make casino owners wait and fidget for their land leases to be “gazetted,” today is MGM Resorts International’s lucky day. MGM China received final approval for its Cotai Strip megaresort. Deutsche Bank analyst Carlo Santarelli calls the timing “ahead of expectations,” which suggests that Macanese [...]

By the time Revel CEO Kevin DeSanctis realizes he’s made a mistake, he’s almost always past the point of no return. Although it is my deeply rooted opinion that smoking is a noxious, disgusting habit that invades other people’s space, banning it has been demonstrated to cause a 15% or greater decrease in the revenues [...]

You can practically hear the wind whistling through the corridors of power as top execs continue to jump — or are flung — from the sinking Caesars Entertainment ship. First, CFO Jonathan Halkyard up and quits, in favor of the lower-stress environment of Nevada Energy. Now a major power vacuum is created by the ouster [...]

We’ve learned two important things today. One, that the Mayan calendar is not the most reliable predictor of events. Two, that Ameristar Casinos‘ on-again/off-again talk about putting itself up for sale was back in “on” mode. Before hardly anybody got wind of what was happening, Ameristar cut a deal to be purchased by Pinnacle Entertainment. [...]