What if they held an implosion and nobody came?

Tropicana Las Vegas CEO Alex Yemenidjian has played the publicity game very astutely of late. So it’s hard to imagine what he was thinking when he decided to implode a wing of low-rise hotel rooms in the dead of night and without any advance fanfare. The demolished wing will give way to a Tropicana Avenue porte-cochere. Still, here was a chance to draw attention to another dramatic change at the Trop and Yemenidjian, so to speak, blew it. Incidentally, “South Beach” is the Trop’s preferred code phrase for repositioning the venerable resort toward the growing Latino market, though you have to wonder why management feels such euphemistic dissembling is necessary.

Be patient, Ohio. We are informed that Dan Gilbert and Harrah’s Entertainment have agreed “in principal [sic]” on Harrah’s management contract for Rock Ventures‘ two Buckeye State casinos. A year after Ohio voters approved casinos, the two companies are still dickering over the terms of their pact, which in turn is holding up groundbreaking. Once Gilbert and Harrah’s get on the same page, the $600 million project’s timeline calls for erection of a temporary casino sometime next year, while work on the permanent facility progresses toward a 2013 opening. Since one casino is destined for Cleveland and the other for Cincinnati, shame on Harrah’s if it doesn’t put the Caesars imprimatur on one or both.

Circus Circus is big into predictive analytics for figuring out how to keep customers coming back for more. Wouldn’t it be simpler to clean the place up and bring it into the 21st century?