Just when it looked like Gary Loveman & Co. were going to get away with murder in the Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. bankruptcy, U.S. District Judge Shira 
Scheindlin said, in essence, ‘Not so fast.’ Judge Scheindlin found the movement of assets and stripping of guarantees from creditors to be in violation of the Trust Indenture Act of 1939. The guarantee removal is “an impermissible out-of-court restructuring,” she ruled, precisely what the act “is designed to prevent.” Caesars endgame was to but CEOC “into bankruptcy while protecting Apollo Management LP and TPG Inc. from CEOC’s creditors.” She added that the companies’ bobs and fakes were “an impairment of the right to sue for payment.”
Bankruptcy may be a headache for Caesars management but it’s a happy day for Total Rewards members. In an e-mail blast to card holders, the company reassured recipients that it was business as usual and then some. Caesars wrote, “here’s the really exciting news! We would like to take this opportunity to give you MORE! Through March 31st, 2015, we are giving you a 50% bonus on the first 50,000 Tier Credits you earn! So, you could walk away with up to 25,000 EXTRA Tier Credits to count towards your Tier Status, and we even started counting on January 1st.*”
In other words, we’re not really on the ropes, so come and play extra-large, on us.
* Close to home, the poker room at The Linq went bust. A tweet thanked players for “years [sic] of patronage and support.” This continues the diminution poker at Flamingo Road and the Las Vegas Strip. When Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall was remade into The Cromwell, poker was discarded, as was the case when O’Shea’s was reinvented as a mini-casino inside The Linq. Also, the house rake at Harrah’s Las Vegas has been cut by 20%. The demise of poker at The Linq makes it the twelfth room to go dark in Vegas since September 2012.
* With Chinese tourism soaring (up 41% last year), the South Korea government has decided it wants, even needs more casinos. It has announced plans to select proposals for two additional, billion-dollar proposals after midsummer. Gambling isn’t the only thing driving the Korean economy: Retail sales were up 32% last year as well.
* What happens in Vegas goes to Broadway. At least that’s the case for Honeymoon in Vegas, which reimagines the cinematic movie caper as a big-scale B’way musical, still complete with Flying Elvises. Tony Danza, who gave much needed heart to the Vegas production of The Producers, inherits the James Caan role here and wins accolades from New York Times critic Ben Brantley, who says it “offers the perfect sunny holiday for frozen Eastern city dwellers.” Still, he frets that “theater pundits have worried that the show might have lost its momentum in the meantime. An overextended preview period in the dead of a glacial winter and all but invisible advertising haven’t helped. Besides, musicals about Las Vegas have seldom worked on Broadway.” Let’s hope that this is the exception.
