Sir Richard Branson hasn’t taken the door keys to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino yet but he’s already got a lot of fans in the Culinary Union. According to a Culinary press release, both Virgin Hotels and outgoing 
owner Brookfield Asset Management “have all agreed to a fair process that will ensure management remains neutral as the Hard Rock Las Vegas workforce in the unions’ classifications choose whether to unionize.” This comes as a relief because, for a while there, it looked as though Brookfield would force the Culinary to picket the HRH. No longer the case. “This is a new era of positive labor-management cooperation at the Hard Rock Las Vegas. Card-check neutrality agreements provide a fair process that are the standard for the Culinary and Bartender Union’s 83-years of organizing over 800,000 workers,” crowed the formal statement.
Of course, with the advent of Branson, the Hard Rock logo is out and the Virgin one is in, so we’ll see how much equity the brand has in Las Vegas. Our hope is that this virginal experience will be sufficiently successful to sire other Virgin hotel-casino offspring.
* A federal appellate court ruling against Big Fish Casino could have serious implications for social casinos, as in ‘make their value evaporate.’ It never made sense to me that you could pay to buy additional chips on social-gaming sites and yet it was not Internet gambling. The court agreed, saying these additional chips constituted “something of value,” as defined by Washington State law and that it was illegal of Big Fish to offer them.
“The virtual chips, as alleged in the complaint, permit a user to play the casino games inside the virtual Big Fish Casino. They are a credit that 
allows a user to place another wager or re-spin a slot machine. Without virtual chips, a user is unable to play Big Fish Casino’s various games,” Judge Milan D. Smith wrote. “Despite collecting millions in revenue, Churchill Downs, like Captain Renault in Casablanca, purports to be shocked—shocked!—to find that Big Fish Casino could constitute illegal gambling. We are not.” The ruling could present problems for Churchill Downs but farther-reaching ones for Aristocrat Technologies, Big Fish’s new owner. It’s into Big Fish for $990 million, dough that suddenly looks like Monopoly money in light of Judge Smith’s edict.
* After much pooh-pooh of its poor first-year results, which even Global Gaming Business deemed “abysmal,” Del Lago Casino is suddenly crying “uncle!” It wants a lower tax rate from New York State (remember, the casino developers agreed to the rates they’re paying) but, since the purpose of the four new casinos was to raise revenue for the state, we don’t expect the plea to fall on sympathetic Albany ears.
