Lucky Dragon gets another step ahead; ETGs a hit at Sands Bethlehem

Lucky Dragon Casino is speeding to completion while Resorts Las Vegas and Alon can’t get out of the starting blocks. (Resorts World did Tweet that it had finished paving its parking garage, making it Las Vegas‘ most high-budgeted place to put your car.) Today, Lucky Dragon announced its restaurant repertory, developed with the assistance of chef Willy Ng, of Koi Palace (scroll down) in San Francisco. Street-food emporium Dragon’s Alley will feature a show kitchen that extends into the casino floor. Pearl Ocean offers a dim sum menu highlighted by live seafood. Phoenix is an eclectic mixture of Chinese-food trends: “Kurobuta pork, deer tendon, abalone and countless other rare and expertly prepared delicacies will punctuate the culinary adventure,” reads the announcement. Cha Garden is a ’round-the-clock tea room featuring a waterfall and “shoreline swimming pond.” Finally, Bao Now is a fast-food outlet adjacent to the casino floor. If Resorts World is planning to cater to the Chinese player, it may find that Lucky Dragon has co-opted him.

* After years of pursuit, plurality shareholder Z Capital Partners has acquired Affinity Gaming in a $580 million deal valued at $17.35 a share. If Z Capital knows what’s good for Affinity, it will keep CEO Michael Silberling and his team in place: No need to fix what’s not broken. In addition to having a monopoly on the Primm market, Affinity is the owner of Silver Sevens in Las Vegas, plus casinos in Colorado, Iowa and Missouri, making it a mostly rural operator. Ominously, Z Capital CEO James Zenni sounded as if he planned to run Affinity with a heavy hand, saying, “We look forward to leveraging our broad expertise across the hospitality, restaurant, retail and consumer sectors to help Affinity continue to expand, while driving profitability through operating improvements and enhanced efficiencies.” Yes, because private equity firms have had such a good track record running casinos.

* Caesars Entertainment has to convince a skeptical Judge Benjamin Goldgar that it’s making enough progress with junior bondholders that it deserves an extension of the injunction that stymies lawsuits against the company until Aug. 29. Heeding Goldgar’s prompting, it looks as though Apollo Management and Texas Pacific Group are going to loosen their purse strings and make the settlement a bit richer for dissident creditors. However, Caesars didn’t convince Goldgar that litigation would create chaos, as he replied by asking if the Chapter 11 wasn’t “already one of the great messes of our time.” Gary Loveman should put that quote on his resumé. In the meantime, not having learned from its past excesses, Caesars has revived its pursuit of a Toronto megaresort. Does it really have the billions to throw at a casino on wintry Canadian shores?

* There may or may not be a cause-and-effect relationship but the installation of an electronic table games arena at Sands Bethlehem coincided with the casino’s biggest tables gross ever (although only slightly more than it made in January). “It’s going to take some time for people to learn how they work, but they’re doing exactly what we expected. The potential is there,” said CEO Mark Juliano, refraining from taking a victory lap. The Morning Call reported that Sands’ “hybrid games accounted for only a small portion of its gambling revenues [$402,000] for July, but that it came in a shortened month and without a dime of marketing shows its potential.” The electronic tables are part of an effort to tailor Sands as an attractive proposition for Asian and young players (and young Asian players, presumably).

* A noblesse oblige proposal by DraftKings and FanDuel to create a new category of gaming license in Nevada, a “fantasy sports license,” and pay a measly $10,000 a year to operate in the Silver State got the back of the hand from the Nevada Gaming Policy Committee. The pitch was a transparent attempt to bypass gaming regulations, and operate with as little oversight and taxation as humanly possible. So little, in fact, that regulators say the annual levy wouldn’t cover the cost of policing the DFS industry in Nevada. Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) said committee members like DFS in principle but want to see more collaboration with state regulatory bodies. “I think the collective wisdom of the panel is that there’s a lot more work to do and I didn’t see any indication from the [DFS] industry that they’re willing to go forward yet,” said Sandoval, while MGM Resorts International CEO Jim Murren called the discussion to date “a step in the right direction,” seeing as DFS companies had initially fled Nevada rather than undergo licensing. Committee members also took umbrage with the laxity of penalties and criminal background checks that DraftKings and FanDuel would impose on themselves — much less than have been instituted in other states where DFS has been legalized.

Telling the DFS giants that they didn’t know their audience, Nevada Gaming Commission Chairman Tony Alamo said, “Nevada is the gold standard … there’s just not an appetite for ‘regulation light’ or ‘regulation not at all.’” He also chided the DFS firms for frittering away five months before submitting a proposal. Everyone will now have to scramble to achieve a satisfactory formula by Sept. 30 if there is to be agreement at all. Even attorney Frank Schreck, usually a gung-h0 advocate for changing gaming policy in the state, waxed cautious, saying, “To allow a circumvention of that [licensing] process would do irreparable harm to the integrity of Nevada’s gaming regulatory structure.” To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, if you’ve lost Schreck, you’ve lost Nevada.

* Speaking of taxes, members of Florida‘s Miccosukee Tribe can no longer avoid sharing their $120,000-$160,000 annual distributions of casino revenue with Uncle Sam. The ruling will fall especially hard on defendant Sally Jim, who will have pony up $278,000 in back taxes as well as — the real killer — interest and penalties. Yep, The Man will get you one way or another.