Ruffin it; Atlantic City: up in smoke?

“Nightclubs — we just didn’t fare well with them. There are so many nightclubs. Everyone’s got just one or two. Ours were just marginal.” That’s Treasure Island owner Phil Ruffin‘s argument for repositioning the pirate place for a mid-market, middle-aged crowd. The State of Nevada ought to give Ruffin a medal for ridding us of Christian Audigier: The Nightclub, home of the Europoseur “designer,” his tacky Ed Hardy shirts and the worst rotgut Merlot ever known to Man. Kudos, Mr. Phil.

(Two Europoseurs down: Audigier and Nicole Duerr. Now if only we could banish Quisp lookalike Guy Laliberté back to his home planet.)

Lights out. Casino analyst Corey Morowitz offers an interesting rationale for the potential no-smoking policy at Revel. In a smoker-dominated environment (one in which no-smoking areas are flouted with impunity), Revel could niche-market itself as the clean-air place, more environmentally sensitive and with-it than anyplace in town. There are obvious risks, which Morowitz acknowledges, but it’s easier for CEO Kevin DeSanctis to start smokelessly and backpedal if need be than vice versa: Once people start puffing away, that’s property damage that can never be undone. Were Revel to go smoke-free in a couple of years, it would smell like an ashtray, barring a complete re-do of its interior.

Atlantic City’s story is one of ideas untried and opportunities missed. Riding a three-decade wave of prosperity (which mysteriously failed to trickle down), city fathers and casino owners rarely bothered to plan for tomorrow, preferring to punt the difficult issues into next year … and the year after that. When the tide went out, they were sitting on their overleveraged assets, having to fight over a dramatically dwindling customer base. Only Boyd Gaming got ahead of the curve with Borgata and it should have been a wake-up call to everyone else when, instead of growing the market, Borgata cannibalized it. But no, they snoozed. Harrah’s Entertainment complacently doubled down on the market when it devoured Park Place Entertainment, right in the teeth of casino expansion in Pennsylvania — another in Gary Loveman‘s long list of blunders.

Now, to keep Atlantic City afloat, Gov. Chris Christie (R) has signed off on some reforms (?) that threaten to worsen the customer experience still further. For instance, scrapping minimum-staffing rules may seem like an innocuous move … until you can’t collect your winnings because your slot machine has malfunctioned and there’s no technician working that shift. Or, what if Casino X conveniently decides to remove a progressive game from the floor because it’s now allowed to pocket all the accumulated coin. (Even Nevada isn’t that laissez-faire.)

Trump Entertainment Resorts CEO Robert Griffin forecasts that the market will bottom out later this year. For his job’s sake, he’d better be right because if his nightmare vision of a two-casino Atlantic City comes true, neither of the survivors will bear the noxious Trump name (emblematic of the man whose penurious casinos used to offer slot machines without stools). It’ll be Borgata and Harrah’s Marina and that’s it — and just maybe the Golden Nugget, as the Marina District gradually usurps the Boardwalk’s place in history.

The circus comes to town. It’s an indication of how far behind the times the Boardwalk is that Resorts Atlantic City‘s Naked Circus could raise eyebrows. On the Las Vegas Strip, a girlie show where the performers have their “naughty bits” concealed would be regarded as tame, to say the least: Remember the ire Peepshow drew when it opened as a pasty-wearing “topless” extravaganza? (The “extrava” has gradually been stripped from the “ganza,” along with the pasties.) As for CEO Dennis Gomes‘ recent purge of waitresses he deemed insufficiently pulchritudinous, S&G should have made book that ambulance-chaser Gloria Allred would hit town soon afterward, lawsuit in hand and TV cameras in her wake. Just because one deplores Gomes’ troglodytic decision doesn’t mean one has to applaud the Allred Traveling Media Circus.

What Macao spends on behalf of problem gamblers ($106 million) totally puts Nevada to shame. ‘Nuff said. Let us bow our heads in collective shame.

Geez, it’s no wonder that money men on Wall Street are a tad reluctant to invest in tribal casinos. Mohegan Sun isn’t just downsizing all the work it already did on its “Project Horizon” hotel-casino, it’s scrapping it altogether. The Mohegans will re-start from the ground up on a 300-500-room hotel. Nearby rival Foxwoods Resort Casino is claiming that its four hotels are averaging 90%+ occupancy but I’ll bet you ever dollar in my wallet Foxwoods is comping the bejeesus out of those rooms.

Mohegan Sun also warrants an entry in the How Quickly They Forget File. It seems like just yesterday the tribe was pulling back from a Kansas proposal and ditching Project Horizon. Now it wants to develop in western Massachusetts and New York State simultaneously. Bunching even two destination resorts together on the Eastern Seaboard seems risky enough. Potentially cutting into Mohegan Sun’s Bay State customer base as well suggests an appetite for risk bordering on gluttony. CEO Mitchell Etess (above) is spacing the projects as far apart in the tri-state area as he can, but still …

Unfortunately for the Mohegans (or perhaps fortunately), the Massachusetts Lege has lost its zeal for casino expansion this session, maybe because Gov. Deval Patrick (D) scuppered a viable plan last year. Too bad, because there is no shortage of developers wanting to get in on the act. These include Warner Gaming, a consortium of former Station Casinos executives who are currently running the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino after a chastened Morgans Hotel Group fled Vegas. The Mashpee Wampanoags continue to reservation-shop their way around the state while Caesars Entertainment, just as S&G predicted, intends to piggyback onto an existing horse track — Suffolk Downs, at least for the time being. (Loveman is nothing if not fickle.)