Station Casinos reported revenue yesterday and the Palms is on track for 6% ROI this year. So there’s some work to be done. 
Management is already off to a good start by closing the world’s largest Hooters, victim of sagging performance. This just goes to show that previous, private equity owners should never have replaced Garduño’s, one of the last vestiges of the George Maloof era. If we could offer a suggestion to Station, it should get ahead of the curve and convert Hooters into an e-sports arena. They’ve got the footprint for it and, if MGM Resorts International is buying into the e-sports phenomenon (at Luxor), you can be sure it’s a pretty safe bet.
“While this quarter was nothing to write home about (as was expected), we are willing to be patient here, to a degree,” JP Morgan analyst Joseph Greff wrote, taking into wage, population and job growth in Clark County. Deutsche Bank analyst Carlo Santarelli agreed that the near term would “remain choppy,” identifying weak food and beverage performance, and ongoing construction at Palace Station as impediments to progress. But Station’s “issues are transitory” and unlikely to dampen and strong performance in the back half of 2017 and throughout 2018, despite the drag-anchor effect of the Palms. Despite a weak quarter there, Station management thinks it can get return on investment up to 11% by year’s end. Given the quality of the property, that ought to be achievable.
* Now he tells us. Hard Rock International CEO Jim Allen gave a lecture on what he’d learned in the casino biz, dispensing some wisdom that the industry should have been heeding during the Big Bust of 
2008: finance your casino probably and don’t get over-leveraged and “we will be fine in this industry.” Took bad for Colony Capital, Columbia Sussex, Station and Caesars Entertainment, which all crashed and burned from too much debt. Avoid high interest, too, such as the 14% hard-money rate that the Trump Organization was paying when Allen worked there. By contrast, the Seminole Tribe counterintuitively bought Hard Rock in 2008 and the rest is history, thanks to the strength of the brand. The company is planting its flag in Berlin, Times Square and Atlantic City, and “If they want to legalize gaming in Cuba we’re all for it.”
* In a related development, the Seminoles are getting some unwitting help from the government of Miami Beach, whose city council voted unanimously to ban casinos from the municipality. “The Florida Legislature had agreed that there was going to be one or two casinos in our backyard, without us even having a moment to weigh in any way,” said mayoral candidate Dan Gelber. This will frustrate Fontainebleau Hotel, which has been hankering for a casino, but the council valued the counsel of local mogul Norman Braman, who argued that the minuses of casino gambling outweighed the pluses. If like sentiment catches on in Miami proper it will be very bad news for Genting Group and its big plans there.
* If PokerStars weren’t already such a force in gaming, news of its new pact with International Game Technology would be even bigger news. As it stands, it’s still pretty big. PokerStars will license game content from the rich IGT library, including evergreen Wheel of Fortune. Considering that poker revenue has flattened, this is an astute counter-attack by PokerStars management. House-banked games are where PokerStars revenue growth is at and that fact should only become more so on the strength of today’s news.
Hard Rock is going to Cypress too!