It's appropriate that a top-hush luncheon between Sheldon Adelson and chief adversary Stanley Ho was held in a Venetian Macao ballroom: Even in such a spacious venue, it must have been a tight squeeze fitting both tycoons and their respective egos in there. A Las Vegas Sands mole told Macau Business it was a social encounter "with no particular business agenda."

"What a nice casino you have, Sheldon. I'm really going to enjoy owning it."

Perhaps the duo simply commiserated over the recent decimation of their personal wealth. If so, it was a waste of time because the two men have quite a lot else to discuss. Adelson, for one, has performed a volte-face on the issue of junket commissions. Sands used to be the worst obstructionist of Macao CEO Edmund Ho's commission cap, even when escalating commission wars threatened to render Macao casinos a revenue-negative venture.

Now Adelson and Ho are on the same page, wanting commissions to be lower still. (It's amazing what a little mutual adversity will do.) They also share a desire for a lower casino tax. Lotsa luck there, although they might be able to sell it to Peking as an palatable tradeoff for continued visa restrictions.

Perhaps a large heaping of crow -- a dish not customarily favored by CEOs -- was on Adelson's plate. According to Macau Business, "the SJM managing director [Ho] also said he would be interested in buying part of LVS business in Cotai." It would be the comeuppance to end all comeuppances if the price of keeping the Cotai Strip™ alive would be for Adelson to cede partial ownership to Stanley Ho. The latter's been Adelson's verbal whipping boy ever since the sultan of Sands vowed to reinvent Macanese casino industry. Which he did, but it's been a Pyhrric victory.

A grudging Adelson-Ho detente -- perhaps even alliance -- is no longer the preposterous scenario it would have been just six months back. Public pronouncements to the contrary, Sands appears nowhere near to landing equity partners for its frozen Cotai Strip™ projects and Adelson's recent stock purchase was regarded as a critical "tell" in this regard. Or, to put it another way, if a deal were in the offing and Adelson -- knowing that -- bought LVS low, he'd soon find himself spending quality time with the SEC. Adelson may be rash but he's nowhere near stupid.

It will be poetically apt if Tuesday's ballroom setting prefigures the emergence of Stanley Ho as Sheldon Adelson's dancing partner. The Sands CEO could do much worse. Dr. Ho is a trophy-winning terpsichorean tycoon, famous for cutting a stylish figure on the ballroom floor. An Adelson-Ho pas de deux would be the most fascinating Dancing with the Stars pairing yet.

P.S. Special thanks to GamingFloor.com Editor Ian Sutton for the heads-up.