I-cahnned! River Palms sold; PokerStars out of A.C., Langford out to lunch

Subtract one casino from the Tropicana Entertainment portfolio: The River Palms Resort & Casino, in Laughlin, just went for $7 million today. TropEnt CEO Anthony Rodio isn’t pulling out of the Colorado River market altogether. He says the company will continue to maintain its presence at the Tropicana Express (a former Ramada), which has been the priority property for some time. LVA reader queries about the future of the River Palms (left) have focused on a steady diminution of amenities. It could certainly be argued that today’s price — less than impressive — reflects long periods of neglect, dating all the way back through the Carl Icahn era to the pinch-penny regime of Columbia Sussex.

The River Palms now goes into the relatively untested hands of M1 Gaming. It’s the sort of small-scale enterprise that has flourished in the years following the Big Crash of the casino industry, scavenging up surplus properties and trying to turn them around. While M1 may be a comparative newbie, its executive team is veteran, including former Planet Hollywood COO Dean DiLullo. He and his top lieutenants all seem to have crossed paths at Station Casinos and Director of Finance Jim Rolfe comes by way of another ColSux casualty, the MontBleu Resort & Casino near Lake Tahoe. M1 not so recently obtained the “highly distressed” Boomtown Reno from Pinnacle Entertainment, then in retrenchment mode. It also owns the ill-starred Fortune Valley Casino, in Colorado. By moving into the Laughlin market, M1 gets a chance to show what it can do against some of the big boys.

You read it hear first. Sure enough, the owner of controversial PokerStars — politically toxic Rational Group — has walked away from a deal to buy the Atlantic Club Hotel & Casino from Colony Capital. Given the unsavory PokerStars angle, I don’t expect New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to spend political capital to bring them back to the table. And, since it went to a grind-joint marketing strategy, Colony is actually starting to see a decent financial return on the former Atlantic City Hilton, which it ran into the ground under its old name.

In the meantime, add Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford to the roster of those who are only too eager to call it quits on Christie’s five-year plan for the resort city. He summoned the Las Vegas Review-Journal‘s Howard Stutz to his office to run up the white flag on the plan, now at its midpoint. A longtime loose cannon, Langford (right) was characteristically irrelevant when he said he the amenity-oriented push to reinvent the city should have been undertaken back in 2003. Well, it didn’t, everybody finally agrees about that and there’s no point in bawling over spilled milk. Langford’s also rather late to the party in his complaint that the new tourism zone “segregates the poorer areas from the wealthier parts of Atlantic City.” Hell, that happened back in the late Seventies, when casino development was restricted to the Boardwalk and Marina District. Whoops. Anyway, Langford should be unleashing his wrath on a casino industry that was arthritic and slow in terms both responding to development in Pennsylvania, and coming together with a common purpose in Atlantic City until the horse had long since fled the barn.