It's official: "Pit Bull of Comedy" Bobby Slayton has snarled his last at the Tropicana Las Vegas. Thus endeth a brief, inauspicious reign by Anthony Cools over the Trop's upstairs showroom. A well-placed source advises LVA that Beatles tribute show Penny Lane was pulled after EMI hit it with a cease-and-desist letter. In any event, it left as invisibly as it arrived.

Trop CEO Alex Yemenidjian still has three shows he inherited from predecessor Scott Butera but it's pretty clear that he's going to put his own stamp on the property. As for Cools, well, he'll always have O'Shea's.

Movement at Cosmo. Buried in the Review-Journal (six items deep) is the news that the Cosmopolitan has wooed John Marshall Andrew away from Las Vegas Sands to be its CFO and hired Station Casinos refugee Marshall Andrew as chief information officer. Deutsche Bank looks serious about making that September '10 opening date.

Will the economy have improved sufficiently to have absorbed most of the CityCenter rooms and the Planet Hollywood Westgate ones by then (and maybe, but not very likely, Fontainebleau)? Boyd Gaming is betting otherwise. The Echelon cranes have been seen coming down, marking an additional hiatus in the project, which reportedly will not be resumed until 2012.

Las Vegas Sands: Execs overboard!

Andrew is just the latest exec lured -- or chased -- away from Sheldon Adelson's employ. Former Venetian veep Paul Pusateri (who helped launch Paris-Las Vegas back in the day) was just nominated as president at The Palms and ever-helpful Sands spokeswoman Mindy Eras has gone to Preferred Public Relations. Whether these moves are part of Adelson's promised cost reductions or are a winnowing out of perceived William Weidner loyalists, it must be getting lonely at the top.

There's quite a debate going on at the Las Vegas Sun on the rise and fall of themed resorts on the Strip. Surf over, check it out, maybe weigh in, if the spirit moves you.

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"Too cool for Vegas." -- a friend's description of Frank Gehry's design for the Lou Ruvo Center for the study of Alzheimer's disease.

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Relaxation of stringent visa restrictions from Guangdong Province came a full four months sooner than expected, starting Sept. 1. Now, residents will be able to visit Macao once a month instead of quarterly. While this has prompted J.P. Morgan to raise its price target on Las Vegas Sands stock, analysts also fret that Sands may overreact and go pedal to the metal on its unfinished Cotai Strip™ hotels.

Those same analysts are bullish on the manufacturing sector, though. They think casinos will be more willing to reinvest in the slot base as 2009 draws to a close. Also, the onward march of casino expansion means more jurisdictions and facilities to whom IGT, Bally and WMS can peddle their products. They're 'meh' on regional casino operators like Penn National, Ameristar Casinos and Pinnacle Entertainment, due to flattish performance. (Penn could catch a break in Kansas, though I still think Cordish Gaming has that sewn up.)

But that's a rave notice compared to the long face Morgan analysts pull when pondering Boyd Gaming's prospects. They cite the slow-to-recover, promo-driven locals-casino market in Las Vegas ("trickle-down" economics of the worst sort); Atlantic City's critical condition -- "the best-case scenario here is that [Borgata] would do less bad" than most of A.C. -- those blah regional metrics and new competition for the Blue Chip riverboat in Indiana, which had been looking like 2009's feel-good story.

Intriguingly, the prospect of a Strip acquistion is floated in lieu of a 'stalking horse' bid for floundering Station Casinos. Boyd's still got enough unused borrowing capacity it could even swing an acquisition of The Mirage (with money to spare), not to mention some of the lower-hanging fruit, which now includes Planet Hollywood. But if the J.P. Morgan guys are gun-shy concerning Boyd ...

They're over the moon about MGM Mirage's CityCenter: "we are increasingly under the belief that City Center will be a new must-see property for both domestic and international gamers/travelers that should drive solid visitation volumes to the Strip in 2010. We were impressed with the massive 18m-square-foot complex ... a new type of high-end product for the Strip that should garner increased trips. It has a very contemporary feel that is different than anything else on the Strip, with lots of natural light and high ceilings, interesting room product and, for a massive property, ease of getting around from one 'neighborhood' to the next."

More good news comes in the form of a press release from Commerce Casino (in Commerce, Calif.), which rolled out the welcome mat for a group of undoubtedly weary firefighters. A strike force of 30 Bay Area-based firemen is being housed in the casino's hotel, with the casino comping all meals and picking up most of the hotel tab. Let's hope that such civic-mindedness spreads through the industry like -- if you'll forgive the analogy -- wildfire.

In case it matters, "super-starlet" (yes, that's the official term) Holly Madison has been given a 12-month contract extension at Peepshow, so she's obviously earning her pay. Also, I've heard through the grapevine that she and incoming Aubrey O'Day do not get along, so the timing of the Madison announcement should make clear who's got the upper implant in this situation.

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As we were driving to LVA HQ this morning, we spotted a disoriented-looking little cat running through the Flamingo Rd./I-15 interchange, across from Caesars Palace. We were in a quandary about what to do until it turned and started ambling down the I-15 "on" ramp, heading straight for certain death. I ran down the ramp after it (the kitty's a fast little bugger), scooped it up in one hand and ...

Well, what to do? I am now the custodian of a small, tuxedo-patterned kitten who may be carrying God knows what infections. It's too docile to be a feral cat but it's definitely going to need a new residence. So if anybody reading this can lend a helping hand to a homeless kitty, contact me at dmckee@huntingtonpress.com. I could just plop the wee bairn out in the LVA parking lot, along with our resident strays, but they're all massive and it would be a very Darwinian situation, I fear.

Cheesparing at Station: The formidable Jean Scott has news of some recent and untoward developments at Station Casinos, as the bankrupt company resorts to new "economy" measures. While the Fertitta clan sinks approximately $90 million into Orange County mansions, they're recouping the cost of their poor business decisions out of their customers' hides.

Random observations: Last night, we celebrated my Better Half's birthday, partly at Cadillac Ranch, which seems to have an identity crisis. Its menu is slightly countrified (in a C&W sense), its walls are covered with photos of Baby Boomer rock stars (think Steven Tyler) and the video feed is heavy on hip-hop. Go figure. The root beer float is very good, though. At 10:30, as though by prearranged signal, an incoming tide of douchebags flooded the joint and we split ...

... the classy southern façade of Mandarin Oriental has now been marred by a building wrap, high up on one corner. It's small by building-wrap standards, managing to both spoil the view and look like a timid half-measure ...

... speaking of building wraps, Criss F. Angel has long since been evicted from the eastern façade of Luxor. A new wrap was placed on the northeast corner of Luxor's ancillary hotel, but it's also smallish and -- due to way the hotel's buttresses jut forward -- hard to see if you're driving into Vegas from the south. Then again, if I were MGM Mirage, I'd probably want to downplay with association with the widely ridiculed Mr. Angel, too.

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Second-quarter results from Boyd Gaming and Ameristar Casinos gave continued reason to be sanguine about each company. Both reported profits (12 cents per share at Boyd, double that at Ameristar) and both missed their revenue targets by an aggregate of only $8 million. A whopping (27%) jump in Colorado revenues for Ameristar last month was additional reason for confidence, offsetting weakness in Kansas City.

Cost control was credited with helping Boyd's performance, as was much-better-than-expected cash flow at Borgata. The Las Vegas locals market also ran ahead of expectations in that regard, while downtown and the Midwest/South casinos lagged. Bankruptcy filing or no, Boyd maintains that it continues to be a suitor for Station Casinos. Oh, and keeping Echelon mothballed -- while the least expensive of alternatives -- isn't cheap, costing Boyd $3 million a month.

MGM Mirage has sent LVA a revised, official list of dates for the debut of the various bits and pieces of CityCenter. (Excepted, of course, is the Harmon[ini] which, as of last Wednesday, had no firmer opening date than "late 2010.") The openings are as follows:

Vdara (Dec. 1); Crystals (Dec. 3); Mandarin Oriental (Dec. 4); Aria (Dec. 16), while condo closings in Veer Towers are set to "begin in January." When MGM gave a CityCenter dog-and-pony show to the Nevada Hospitality & Lodging Association last week, the computer graphics still showed Baldwin's Bump at its original, 48-story height. Also, the bluish tint that denoted CityCenter's acreage, by quirk or design, extended to embrace the Cosmopolitan. A portent?

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Morgans Hotel Group has never seemed able to make up its mind about what to do with the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino (one of the stranger acquisitions of recent years). Then-CEO Ed Scheetz came in talking big about classing the place up and raising ADRs. Fast-forward to '09 and the HRH is staking everything on its skanky Rehab parties (does the staff have to don hazmat suits when cleaning up afterwards?) and going for the mid-price market midweek.

One can't fault the latter half of that strategy, especially if you're in an off-Strip location and could use the traffic. However, if Morgans goal was to increase Hard Rock ADRs, perhaps it shouldn't have embarked on a ginormous expansion that practically obliterates Peter Morton's original hotel and dilutes the asking price per room. Also, I don't know whether to praise Morgans for doing the impossible and completing (sort of) its Paradise Tower well ahead of schedule ... or criticize it for being in such a hurry to churn some EBITDA that it's opening it in an unfinished state.

But here's hoping the business model works. The HRH is one of the few places in town that's hiring, not downsizing. At lot of people's jobs are riding on its success.

One less Wolfgang Puck restaurant on the Strip? That's hardly a culinary tragedy, given that he's still got -- what? -- five other places in town and has become the Ronald McDonald of haute cuisine. A laughable poster in McCarran International Airport uses Puck's visage to push the message, "Less celebrity, more chef." Uh, better put that the other way 'round.

The real tragedy here (aside from the loss of jobs) is the temporary demise of Poetry, one of the few venues in town to cater to an upscale African-American clientele. Harrah's Entertainment and the Forum Shops went out of their way to put the dagger in Poetry. Now they congratulate themselves on a job well done. Thanks for nothing, fellas.

Bondholders finally lost patience with Station Casinos, tripping the bankruptcy lever. Interestingly, all Station casinos (small "c") are shielded -- which implies that it's Station's imperial expansion plans which are are shot and that its considerable real estate holdings could be up for grabs. It looks like über-resort Viva, long-suffering Durango Station, Losee Station and umpteen other projects are kaput.

Too bad for Station partner Colony Capital; if the latter goes forward with its Neverland Ranch tourist-trap plans, it may have to disassemble the old Michael Jackson Xanadu and relocate it, lock, stock and menagerie. And what does/did Station have in abundance? Raw land. It was a marriage made in businss heaven but it surely won't reach the altar now.

Speaking of suffering, what's back on the auction block but the Greek Isles, which is $23 million underwater. Even at a revised valuation of $44 million, isn't that far too much to ask for this unremittingly unsuccessful property, the second coming of the Castaways? Perhaps it's time to exorcise this ghost which haunts the dead zone that is Convention Center Drive.

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Another victim of the Comment-Eating Server, Jeff in OKC, writes:

Isn't the Queen of Hearts property part of what is to become the new City Hall? I know the Nevada Hotel and Casino isn't pretty, but it is the first casino built by Sam Boyd as owner, I think I read, and was owned for many years by Downtown icon Jackie Gaughan. That would be enough to give it preservable cachet in most cities. 

IMO, Tamares has been a bad landowner in Las Vegas, having done nothing to enhance their properties, and barely doing any maintenance. I recall reading that they let the unrestricted gaming license on the Nevada lapse. I think the City should pressure them to sell out (The Stevens family's Desert Rock holdings that owns half the Golden Gate could tie the Nevada Hotel tastefully into a complex with the Golden Gate) to others who have a desire to invest in the City. The Siegels have done a miraculous transformation of the Gold Spike, showing that it is possible to do business in the City of Las Vegas.

The Plaza [Hotel] and Las Vegas Club are two properties that have beautiful 1970's and 1980's charm, which are rapidly disappearing in Las Vegas. Their time in the sun is coming, and a fiscally responsible touch up would be in the best interest of the operators and the City. I wish the Mayor was as interested in appropriately keeping what is 30 years old as much as instilling his vision of 30 years into the future.

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Ian Sutton posted this today at GamingFloor.com and I couldn't resist snurching it. Sandwiched between footage of the Lady Luck and other Downtown detritus is a long, loving look at those two fine Tamares Group dereli ... er, acquisitions: the Queen of Hearts and the Hotel Nevada. The latter has long been closed as was (supposedly) the QoH. But I saw some lights on at the old Queen when we drove past it Tuesday night, so who knows?

The bigger question is why Tamares continues to let these eyesores fester, especially with nearby development on Oscar Goodman's famous 61 acres proceeding apace. It's past time to knock this crap down. Even empty land would be an improvement. Ditto the Lady Luck. For a three-syllable solution to that gargantuan hulk, I defer to the time-honored wisdom of Jimmie J.J. Walker:

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On and off, over a four-year period, Harrah's Entertainment teased journalists (and, by extension, the public) with hints of a really big project to be announced really soon ... whenever they got around to it, that is. Well, the Harrah's mountain hath labored and produced ... a mouse.

"Project Link" isn't without virtues, even if they're largely negative ones. It isn't another high-end, multi-billion-dollar megaresort. It's not a budget-buster, period. It's not über-expensive food and retail. And it does entail giving modest facelifts to a couple of Harrah's tattier Strip properties: O'Shea's would lose its faux-Dublin façade and the Imperial Palace's Strip frontage (and pagoda roof) would be supplanted with what appear to be enormous LED screens.

It also acknowledges what's long been one of the problems of Harrah's consolidation of the east side of the Strip into one ginormous province. Namely, that to redevelop it in any significant way would involve taking one or more of a string of multi-story cash registers out of business. True, you could start from the back, maybe knock down the IP first, but at some point push comes to shove and a major cash-flow-producing Strip casino (most likely Harrah's Las Vegas) would have to give way. In a sense, the real estate was already too lucrative to be redeveloped.

Arrival at this plan involved acknowledging certain factors that should have been obvious long before CEO Gary Loveman went on a buying spree. For instance, that MGM Mirage/Wynn Resorts-scale megaresorts are a low-ROI proposition. Or that such a creation might impinge on business at ever-growing Caesars Palace. (It never ceases to amaze me that Harrah's spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to determine what, say, Hunter Hillegas could tell them for free.)

Of course, any new resort built in Lovemanville wouldn't have to be high-end/low-return. That's just the industry group-think of our day; that you "justify" the land's cost by superimposing a hella expensive megaresort atop it, then justify that outlay by charging prices that relatively few can afford.

The notion of luring pedestrians off the Strip and down a multi-dogleg side street is an untested notion. Give Harrah's points for thinking outside the box here. It'll mean getting Vegas visitors to break ingrained habits but it could eventually stimulate further off-Strip development.

For all I know, it could be Gary Loveman's longstanding fantasy to own a 600-foot Ferris wheel with an (at least) 200-foot "HARRAH'S" logo lighting up the night sky. But do I believe this is what he had in mind when he supervised the purchase of vast tracts of Koval Lane real estate at top dollar? Not for a moment. Especially not when you consider he's been sweeping it clean of low-rise housing developments that might otherwise have been of income-producing use.

Now, like Gershwin's Porgy, he's got plenty of nuhtin' and nuthin's plenty for him. His projected Ferris wheel will be sitting (as you can see from the rendering) smack in the middle of a wasteland, a void, a whole lotta nowhere. At least the circus can pitch its tents there the next time it comes to town.

It's harder still to believe that this (mini-)master plan was concocted two years ago and kept under wraps until now ... unless it was a before-the-fact, low-budget, "Well, we've got to do something" concession to the development-crippling effect of the LBO. Even so, secrets just aren't that well kept in this town.

Then again, it often seems if Loveman himself does not know what Loveman has in mind. Take for instance, his recent contention that building a Strip megaresort was too big a risk for Harrah's. Not compared to taking on $24 billion in LBO debt it wasn't. And you could build a megaresort and a half for the $5 billion in company value Loveman recently wrote off.

The biggest threat to Project Link may be Loveman -- or rather his short-attention-span style of leadership. While some cunning master plan may be apparent to his inner circle, the leitmotif of Loveman's tenure as CEO has been to jitterbug spastically from one short-lived initiative to another.

Having gotten right up to the threshhold of having to decide what to do with Lovemanville, his trigger finger grew weak. He pulled a U-turn and flung Harrah's into the arms of Texas Pacific Group and Apollo Management, a move with disastrous consequences. (Especially for the consumer, as TPG/Apollo's plan was to gut the company all along.) At least it had the short-term benefit of sparing beloved local institution Battista's Hole in the Wall from Loveman's bulldozers. As with his jihad against revenue-participation games like Wheel of Fortune, Loveman often seems oblivious or (far more likely) indifferent to what customers like or want.

In the two years or so it will require for Project Link to obtain startup capital, the odds are considerably better than 50-50 that Loveman will have lost interest and moved on to something else. If he doesn't, it would be a very pleasant surprise.

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After fairly flying out of the gate, M Resort has hit the wall. Unfortunately, CEO Anthony Marnell III's response to economic adversity has been to sweat the value propositions. Not only is M fretting about card counters (hands down, the silliest preoccupation in the casino industry), it's yanking full-pay video poker machines.

“We are in business to have an edge and these games are nearly break-even,” Marnell tells Liz Benston. Give him points for candor ... but if you didn't want players to have a 50-50 shot, you should never have installed the machines in the first place, fella. This reeks of bait-and-switch. The video poker community is tightly knit; word of this stuff gets arounds fast and will undoubtedly redound to Marnell's disadvantage.

Another thing that might be working against Marnell are M's distinctly underwhelming coupon offers -- far inferior to those from Station Casinos, for one. The Significant Other and I tend to forward our M "offers" straight into the WPB (waste paper basket). I'd also respectfully dissent with Benston re M's casino design: It's a throwback to the old "disorientation" days. For ease of navigation, M's not a patch on Eastside Cannery, to say nothing of Wynn Las Vegas. Heck, even the venerable Sahara isn't the rat maze that is M's gambling floor.

When "whales" attack. Indicted high roller Terrance K. Watanabe is taking on Nevada's casino-debt-collection machine and his lawyer is making some interesting legal arguments. Basically, he's contending that markers are loans, not checks (as longstanding Nevada precedent would have it). Should this argument prevail at trial, it could have far-reaching consequences.

Since markers could no longer be booked as income, Nevada would no longer be able to tax uncollected markers, as it currently does. Since enforcement of the debt is funded by assessing a 10% penalty on the debtor, Clark County couldn't afford to go after delinquent whales, either. And casinos themselves might have to think even harder before (in effect) lending money to players like Watanabe who, his attorney says, accounted for a fifth of The Rio's and Caesars Palace's casino revenue in a two-year period.

Hoist on its petard. In his latest Las Vegas Business Press column, Dr. David G. Schwartz explains how the consolidation mania of the 1990s (spurred by manic Wall Street analysts) came back to bite the casino industry in its ass when times were tough. So tell us, Nevada Gaming Commission, why was it such a good idea to have an oligopoly on the Strip (and in Lake Tahoe ... and ... )?

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