January was good for the State of Nevada (+8%) but especially powerful for the Las Vegas Strip, up 15%. The casinos played lucky, with baccarat winnings up 68.5%, despite 13.5% less 
being wagered. Strip slot revenues were up 4%, even if they didn’t quite keep pace with a 6% increase in coin-in. Table play was a bit anemic. Casinos won 6.5% more on the felt but players wagered big, 21% more than last year. Casino Electronics Show was credited with helping to drive the strong business.
The locals market stubbornly refuses to recover, down 6%. Downtown was off 11% and the Boulder Strip slid 15%. (According to Deutsche Bank, proxy Boyd Gaming was 6% off.) North Las Vegas was down 6% and the remainder of Clark County was flat. Laughlin pancaked as well but Reno had a breakout month, up 14%. Bumpy Lake Tahoe was a bit off, though, down 4%. Other outstate jurisdictions fared well, including a 7% increase in Elko, for whatever that’s worth.
* Rejected for a casino location, the owners of Nevele are asking the State of New York to make them … a casino, with 750 VLTs. (If it walks like a duck …) They also propose to create a “sportsplex” with “an indoor aquatics center, four baseball fields and eight fields for soccer, field hockey and lacrosse.” The Andrew Cuomo administration is so far keeping mum.
* The Riviera‘s iconic, cream-and-gold casino cage may find a new home. I can say no more.
* Next door, at Fontainebleau, a group of lenders effectively won their case that Bank of America transferred funds to the project in untoward fashion. In the bank’s defense, it halted payments to F-blew after discovering hidden cost overruns. However, that did not placate financiers Avenue Capital Group, Brigade Capital Management and Caspian Capital LP. They accused Bank of America of keeping cash flowing to F-blew at a time when it should have known that the multi-billion-dollar project wasn’t maintaining its covenants. As we now know, the $2.9 billion “budget” was a polite fiction, concealing billions more in “optional” expansions that were touted as part of the original plan. The lenders declared themselves “pleased” while Bank of America kept mum.
* Ironically, for a casino that emphasizes wellness and sustainability to its guests, MGM Grand was the site of a measles outbreak, some of the first cases in Southern Nevada since 
1911. Two MGM employees and a guest caught the disease from “an under-immunized staff member” of Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House. In a conflicting report, an Arizona TV station blamed it on “an infant at the casino restaurant who was too young to be vaccinated.” Considering how cavalier Vegas tourists are about taking their kids, that at least has the ring of plausibility.
Since you can spread measles just by breathing, coughing or sneezing, it would behoove us all to get vaccinated, especially since the germs linger in the air for two hours. (Ick!) Fortunately, the outbreak at the Green Monster appears to have been contained.
