I call your bluff, comrade. As you may have heard, casinos in Russia can stay open by converting to poker rooms. A tip of the fedora goes to reader mike_ch for pointing out this story, which delineates some of the pros and cons. In Vegas, even the strongest poker rooms don't generate nearly the body count that table games and slots do. But Russian casinos are much smaller and at least a few might be able to hang on, depending on the size of the rake.

It's mighty big of the Kremlin, by the way, to concede that poker is a sport, not a game of chance. Now if only Uncle Sam would do the same ...

Rescue the Riv! Random observation from driving down Las Vegas Boulevard last night: The Riviera suddenly looks so much better and more classic when juxtaposed with the incredible bulk that is Fontainebleau. Land values have fallen, RIV stock is worthless and the property itself provides ready access to the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Time, methinks, for Penn National to get off its duff and make an offer ... unless Penn CEO Peter Carlino is waiting for the Riviera to go into bankruptcy, so he can pluck the carcass at auction. Then again, if Carlino really thinks that Planet Hollywood and some or all of Station Casinos are low-hanging fruit, who am I to second-guess him?

Who's the dummy? The purpose of our excursion was to attend an incredibly pointless media event at Madame Tussauds at The Venetian. If there was a point, it was so that the assembled media hordes would serve as extras for yet another episode of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List. A waxwork of Ms. Griffin was being unveiled and suffice it to say that Wax!Griffin looks far better than Real!Griffin. (I must be Officially Jaded, for I scarcely gave the comedienne a second glance.) The various and sundry female impersonators on hand -- led by Frank Marino -- had clearly taken greater care of their appearances than Griffin had of hers. There was, in fact, just about every stripe of LGBT humanity on hand last night, so it was almost more Rainbow Coalition than media event.

What excitement there was went on outside, where a smallish crowd surrounded the Michael Jackson statue. Tributes were in evidence but everything was tasteful and no hysteria was to be seen. As for Mme. Tussauds itself, I've been to the original one in London, and I recall its wax figures as being more believable and the setting itself as more atmospheric (especially the tableaux of infamous British homicides and regicides) ... but that was 35 years ago this month.

Give Vegas Tussauds props for having a Joan Rivers dummy who looks more animated than her real-life counterpart, as seen on the NBC sitcom Celebrity Apprentice. All that's missing is to give the waxwork Rivers a voice box that periodically squawks, "A pokuh playah! A pokuh playah!" Still, we easily spent more time checking out the doodads and gizmos in Brookstone than we did in the wax museum.

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What do you do if your expensively wrought, expensively litigated marketing slogan has jumped the shark and become the most tiresome cliché in America.?If you're the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority, you figure out a way to monetize the fact that your catchprase is played out ... thereby ringing up a few extra changes upon it. Congratulations to R&R Partners for this splendid example of advertisement jujitsu.

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"Nick Cage wasn't a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in Armageddon." -- douchebag/director Michael Bay, getting high on his own ego. For the record, Cage had been playing lead roles (remember a little number called Moonstruck?) for a dozen years and had just won an Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas. Affleck also had an Oscar on his mantle pre-Bay, albeit for screenwriting.

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An S&G source says that an L.A.-based PR firm is putting it about that Aubrey O'Day, late of insta-band Danity Kane, will shortly be replacing Holly Madison in Peepshow ... but that the local ABC-TV affiliate reported Ms. O'Day would be supplanting newly arrived Shoshana Bean. All I know of O'Day is what I've seen in Playboy -- and at least her implants are considerably less grotesque than Madison's. Don't sit in the VIP area or they'll put your eye out.

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Actually, they're pretty much who you thought they were. At least their moronic gullibility gave rise to an unusually witty Twitter posting (by Daily Fiasco.com): "Spencer Pratt: 9/11 an inside job. Conspiracy theorists nationwide rush to say it was probably bin Laden after all."

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News reports are at sixes and sevens of just how much of the Tropicana Las Vegas is now owned by Onex Corp. For instance, Bloomberg states that Onex's stake represents 60% of the $440 million owed on the property (or would that be 60% of a theoretical $733 million/$21.5 million per acre?), while the Calgary Herald confusingly spreads Onex's $440 million -- or would that be $264 million? -- commitment between the Vegas and non-Vegas holdings of Tropicana Entertainment.

The Herald, in an obvious boo-boo, mis-reports that TropEnt was split into Atlantic City and non-A.C. halves. Seriously, once the new LV Trop administration starts taking reporters' calls, could somebody straighten out if Onex's commitment is $440 million, six-tenths of that or some more-confusing permutation altogether? The dueling numbers are starting to make my head spin.

The Calgary paper, though, discover the interesting wrinkle that TropEnt CEO Scott Butera is trying to make off with the Vegas Trop name and lease it back to Onex at $10 million a year. Clever, yes. And, if the courts allow it, Butera's got Onex over a barrel because relaunching old properties with new names has been a losing proposition in Las Vegas. Bereft of its name, the Trop could easily become a big-ass Hooters Hotel.

Amidst this turmoil, Alex Yemenidjian has taken the reins at the Trop with an emphasis on customer service. (Interestingly, if you read the non-R-J coverage, Onex has partly reneged on its capex commitments, rolling back a $100 million reinvestment to $75 million.) The proposed South Beach retheming will have to be done in stages but, hey, that's the way they used to do it.

One need only look at the corpse of the Lady Luck or the gravesite of the Stardust to see the perils of a do-it-all-at-once makeover. And it beats the heck out of Butera's 2014-2016 timeline for even beginning work. While Butera may have been an improvement on Columbia Sussex CEO William J. Yung III, his diffident attitude toward the LV Trop will probably leave few regretting his departure.

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Journalists are working gambling metaphors overtime as they chronicle Vladimir Putin's casino crackdown. Although my previous CNN link dead-ended (pun unintended) are yet more Michael Jackson necroph ... er, coverage, that proved a blessing in disguise. The best and most comprehensive short-form report on the situation in Russia comes from ...

... Al-Jazeera, believe it or not. If you've got a half-hour to spare, Russia Today goes in-depth on the situation. (Ian Sutton has been aggregating links with remarkable thoroughness over GamingFloor.com, if you want even more coverage of Boss Putin's power play.)

For an insight into the paternalistic mentality that led to the Putin Putsch, you can't do better than this:

Not that Americans can afford the luxury of smugness. Consider this Philadelphia TV station's condescending report on Atlantic City, with its snide, disparaging, cliché-ridden attitude toward both gambling and the players themselves:

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Unfortunately, it does not involve some Cinemax hottie like Kim Dawson but rather Mayor Lorenzo Langford, who's doing a fan dance involving Bader Field. He's had discussions with interested developers -- too interesting to discuss! He'll have "exciting" revelations -- too exciting to reveal! And it will -- brace yourselves -- "have some connection with casino gaming."

Why, you could knock me over with a feather.

Right-sized into oblivion. The workforce at Palazzo-Venetian has fallen below 7,000 with yesterday's purge of 194 employees. "It's an effort to continue to right-size our business," wailed the company. Geez, if they're so intent on trimming the ship, how 'bout asking for a give-back from their $2 Million Man, President Michael A. Leven?

Sands bombs in Bethlehem. Forget those roseate cash-flow projections Sheldon Adelson made when building Pennsylvania's second-most-expensive casino. Revenues at Sands Bethlehem have been in a steady decline since the place opened, reducing it to the #5 casino in the Keystone State.

Primm and proper. Although Sin City Kitties has closed (sniff!), there's still reason aplenty to visit the Herbst Gaming trio of casinos in Primm, Nev., Liz Benston contends. Most of those reasons entail copious freebies ... or at least bargain-basement prices.

The story doesn't mention the single most interesting phenomenon I've observed out there: a higher-than-[Strip]-average number of African-American and Latino players (it's the most integrated casino floor I've set foot upon). But Benston's look-in makes a strong case for those of us who think Herbst CEO Ferenc Szony is the man to turn these places around.

The money quote is from Szony's man in Primm, General Manager Michael Starr, who says, "I have yet to make money on a vacant room in this business." There's but a few CEOs in Vegas who couldn't stand to have that chiseled into their bedroom wall so that it's the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing at night. Those are words of wisdom, Mr. Starr. Long may you flourish.

There's theatre in Vegas. True, you have to poke around behind the dodgy Sportsman's Royal Manor on Boulder Highway to find it sometimes. But the trip to the dark side is definitely worthwhile.

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"We’re not going to destroy one of our towers." -- Wynn Las Vegas President Andrew Pascal's retort to a dealer who complained that, post-9/11, Asian gamblers view Wynn's twin towers as bad luck and wear crystals to ward off the evil vibes.

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Yesterday's online version of the Las Vegas Review-Journal devoted actual bandwidth to Editor Thomas Mitchell singing along with his computer:

And you thought we just made that up. Looking on the bright side, Mitchell's hootenanny has gotten exponentially more views as any of his other YouTube videos, one of which features him wearing his trademark Stetson. Oh, and for excitement that's truly palpable, you can't beat this. It's like listening to Gramps wax rhapsodic about his Tin Lizzie.

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