Category: Casino News

Fontainebleau Las Vegas‘ former owner and a fixture of S&G, Carl Icahn has been a naughty boy. The SEC caught him using his shares in Icahn Enterprises (IEP) to cover risky personal loans. Let’s leave aside the question of why someone as fabulously wealthy as Uncle Carl is supposed to be would need personal loans. How would you like to be an investor in IEP, only to learn that its namesake’s stock was mostly pledged to various (undisclosed) lenders? Caesars Entertainment, maybe you should check up on the status of all those CZR shares that Uncle Carl is supposed to be holding. Has he pledged them to any third parties who might come calling?

Continue reading Icahn gets caught

That didn’t take long. After playing tough guy for 12 whole days, DraftKings CEO Jason Robins folded his hand and announced that his much-ballyhooed surcharge on winning bets had been called off. Why? Because he couldn’t tempt FanDuel off the sidelines and into the fray on his behalf. Punishing one’s customers for the sins of politicians never made much sense and even less who when comparative small fry like BetMGM and BetRivers eschewed the loyalty-killing surcharge. ESPN Bet boss Jay Snowden weaseled on the issue, ruling out a (suicidal) surcharge for now but holding open the possibility of sticking it to players in the future. It’s another example of the keen business acumen that has got Snowden where he is today … besieged.

Continue reading You win, DraftKings loses

Having failed to either buy out or litigate the Dotty’s chain of slot parlors from the face of the earth, Station Casinos is going into the tavern business itself. This week it rolled out a new brand, Seventy Six. It’s considerably more upscale than Dotty’s and we’ll get to that in a minute. The first location is slated to be a the junction of Centennial and Lamb boulevards, at the very northern fringe of North Las Vegas, opening this fall. It’s just empty scrub at present, so Seventy Six will be by definition an upgrade. Two additional locations are planned for next year, including one just across the street from the former Aliante Station (a notorious white elephant). Station execs seem obsessed with that area, hence the Boyd Gaming grudge match that is coming.

Continue reading If you can’t beat ’em, become ’em

Like the whiny bitches that they are, DraftKings is taking out its ire at a recent tax increase in Illinois … on the customers. Yup, CEO Jason Robins has found a new way to chisel honest players: surcharges for the privilege of placing a bet with his company. This is vile on the face of it. It’s also DraftKings’ characteristic response to a tax hike that initially had them threatening to leave the Land of Lincoln altogether. We never believed they would. We even double-dared them to do it. No, Robins has found a way to have his cake and eat it too, at bettors’ expense.

Continue reading DraftKings stiffs you; Caesars unloads WSOP

“Much better than a quarter ago,” J.P. Morgan analyst Joseph Greff said of Boyd Gaming‘s second-quarter numbers. The company had arguably shocked Wall Street with its 1Q24 underperformance, so this week’s news was salutary. While Greff, for one, didn’t move off his “Neutral” rating, he did add a dollar to his $67/share price target. “Importantly, its Las Vegas Locals properties showed better/less-bad results,” he wrote of Boyd, adding that Downtown was trending nicely and even the Midwest/South casinos outperformed his estimates … with a last-minute boost from crazy-busy Treasure Chest, whose new iteration debuted in June.

Continue reading Boyd controversial; Sands shortfall