Like bad sex, the connubial bliss between Penn Entertainment and Barstool Sports ended abruptly. Cretinous Dave Portnoy becomes someone else’s problem child following the second-quarter-earnings revelation that Barstool was being sold back to its founder, jilted in favor of much comelier ESPN. Considering Penn’s down-market image, ESPN is doing the company a favor by lending its prestige to a company that has dragged its own name through the mud in pursuit of a sadomasochistic marriage to Portnoy.

“Well, it was fun while it lasted, but, in our view, the handwriting has been on the wall for some time,” wrote Deutsche Bank analyst Carlo Santarelli. “The Barstool partnership was not working, the risks were too significant, and PENN was at a crossroads.” Penn chose to “double down with a new strategy,” opined the pundit. He explained that Penn’s reversal “likely speaks to what is presumably a tough road for its core [brick-and-mortar] business on the horizon, as regional gaming rationalizes from post pandemic peaks and competition hampers performance at core PENN assets.” Barstool Sportsbook will become ESPN Bet. Santarelli believes this is in itself a positive, as the Barstool brand wasn’t what it was cracked up to be as a customer-acquisition tool. (Just a bunch of tools.)

Developer Larry Silverstein‘s PR peeps released additional renderings of The Avenir over the weekend and they are certainly impressive. Few additional details of the proposed resort have been made available but the striking exterior is the work of veteran casino architect Paul Steelman, far outdoing his work for Resorts World New York. For our money, it’s pretty much a tossup between this and Sands Nassau for the most curb-appealing design statement and we hope that New York State authorities will have a hard time choosing between the two. If a casino simply must go into Manhattan, Silverstein gets our vote hands down. More pretty pictures after the jump.

Although Las Vegas numbers from Caesars Entertainment were modestly down in 2Q23, as people visit Sin City more but gamble less, analysts were largely pleased with the results. Why not? A robust, $64 million improvement in the digital sphere of the Roman Empire more than made up for any declivity on the Las Vegas Strip. Online operations even posted an $11 million positive ROI, a sign that Caesars has turned the corner on Internet wagering. True, Wall Street didn’t execute cartwheels in the aisles, indicating that the CZR numbers were in line with what was expected. But stock analysts seemed generally satisfied.