“On my watch, we fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage.” — Mitt Romney, speaking earlier today. Unfortunately, Nevada voters have twice prevented Las Vegas from becoming “the Las Vegas of gay marriage.” Our lo$$.
Money problems at Caesars Entertainment are worse than we thought. According to the New York Post, the company 
If today’s numbers from the Nevada Gaming Control Board indicate that December was good for business — especially on the Las Vegas Strip (up 4% … 7% if you take baccarat out of the equation) — January ought to have been great. Why? Because Dec. 31 fell upon a Saturday … meaning that all those New Year’s Eve weekend slot revenues won’t show up for another month. (The contents of hoppers would have been tallied on Jan. 2, per standard operating procedure.) As Deutsche Bank‘s Carlo Santarelli points out, slot hold was low but it’s almost always low that time of year, due to industry accounting practices. Having an additional weekend day last December obviously didn’t hurt the numbers either. J.P. Morgan analyst Joseph Greff predicts January revenue growth of around 5%, although it’s not clear if he’s referring simply to the Strip or the whole state of Nevada, which was up 2% in December.
“Is this the type of company people mean when they say government should be run like a business?” — Las Vegas Review-Journal reader “hermit,” on the subject of Caesars Entertainment‘s IPO.
It’s hard to say which is funnier or more hubristic: Sheldon Adelson‘s ongoing conceit that he could buy the presidency of the United States or his arrant naiveté, thinking that such ham-fisted involvement in the electoral process wouldn’t 
not many of us are Sheldon Adelson, who’s been ducking the media for weeks, and who did just that. Somebody, somewhere at Las Vegas Sands must have dialed up Fortune and let it be known that Dr. Miriam Adelson would be happy to take some of the heat off of her suddenly bashful husband. How else to explain 
It’s the heartwarming saga of a power couple who went from riches to rags (i.e., a net worth of “a mere $400 million” — shocking penury!) and to riches again … thanks to that naughty “casino lucre,” one might add. McDonald politely defers from asking obvious questions. For instance, if one believes that “Saving a drug addict is the equivalent of saving about 20 people. Treating one drug addict reduces his criminal activity, reduces his arrests, reduces his appearances in court, reduces his time sitting in prison, reduces his injecting drugs, reduces him being infected with HIV & Hepatitis C while sharing needles, and reduces his infecting others,” then why aren’t you 
Thanks to Marina Bay Sands (left) and Resorts World Sentosa, the city-state of Singapore posted record levels of tourism (13 million souls, a 13% increase) last year. While overall tourism-related revenues leapt 17%, entertainment spending — which of course includes gambling — was $4.4 billion, for an eye-popping 37% increase. In their eagerness to cash in, however, Las Vegas Sands and Genting Berhad have gotten a little careless. Both have been fined for waiving the $80 admission fee that Singaporean citizens are legally required to pay. Sands got slapped with a $204,000 fine while Genting will have to write Singapore a $104K check to cover its bad behavior.
Well, not quite but the headline pretty much gives you January’s narrative in a nutshell. After backing out the contribution made by Neil Bluhm‘s new, category-killing Rivers Casino in Des Plaines, gambling revenue from the Land of Lincoln was a feeble $96 million last month, for a same-store comparison of -11%. The most damning statistic is that more people were visiting casinos last month (admissions rose 17%) but per-visitor spend remains flat. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn‘s office should run off copies of Carlo Santarelli‘s sobering revenue breakdown and beat every pro-expansion legislator soundly over the noggin with it. If gamblers continue to spend less, leaving casinos to fight over a stagnant pool of money, all large-scale casino/racino/slot-route expansion is going to accomplish will be to spread the existing misery.
And I do mean misery: Caesars Entertainment‘s take was down 11%, Penn National Gaming‘s fell 19%, as did MGM Resorts International‘s. Rivers Casino is absolutely sucking out the Chicagoland market, its $30 million leaving everyone else eating Bluhm’s dust. MGM’s Grand Victoria Elgin, Hollywood Aurora (-24%), Empress Joliet (-19%) and Harrah’s Joliet (-12%) are all getting their butts kicked, no two ways about it. And that’s what just one new casino can do to the region. Imagine a few more casinos (including one in downtown Chicago) and five racinos, and it gets too ugly 
Unless it can find somebody to relieve it of a fourth and final gaming license, in southeastern Kansas, the Sunflower State’s casino-expansion program reached fruition last Friday. That’s when Hollywood Casino at Kansas Speedway revved the engines of its $411 million racino. Penn National Gaming operates the facility on behalf of the state lottery. After many years and false starts, Kansas’ grand scheme doesn’t look so impressive in the cold light of reality. Other than Penn, most major operators begged off and the concept of a state-owned casino industry is an experiment unlikely to be repeated.
Last Saturday, Sheldon Adelson personally presided over the Special Supplemental Sheldon Adelson Presidential Caucuses (an event hijacked from the state GOP) at the Dr. Miriam & Sheldon G. Adelson Educational Campus … and stepped in it again. Adelson’s footpads, according to Richard A. Oppel Jr. of the New York Times, told caucus goers “they had to sign a legal declaration under penalty of perjury that they could not attend their daytime caucus because of ‘my religious beliefs’ … Mike Dicicco, a [Ron] Paul supporter who drove more than half an hour from Henderson, Nev., said he was asked whether he was Jewish by a poll worker.” (NB: The evening caucus was ostensibly also scheduled for the benefit of Seventh Day Adventists.)
In a pathetically underwhelming announcement, Caesars Entertainment is planning to float an IPO of 1.8 million shares, 
Neither the very conspicuous efforts of Genting Berhad and Las Vegas Sands nor the quieter ones of Wynn Resorts and Caesars Entertainment were sufficient to overcome entrenched conservatism in the Florida Legislature. State Rep. Erik Fresen (R) 
If at least three of the Big Four in gaming came out losers, the industry had its winners. The Seminoles, obviously, staved off a major competitive threat. Mardi Gras Racetrack & Gaming Center and Isle of Capri Casinos‘ Pompano Park racino (left) lived to wager another day, and numerous little parimutuels enjoyed a David-and-Goliath moment. But the big boys came frustratingly close to victory and now have to root against the Florida economy, because future travails are their best hope of gaining admission.
His Trumpness will manifest himself to the assembled media tomorrow, shortly past noon, at Trump International, just off the Las Vegas Strip. Oooohhh, the excitement! The failed casino operator 
“The chief danger heralded by the Adelson-Gingrich relationship aren’t the particulars of [Sheldon] Adelson’s politics. It is the prospect of an individual being willing, able, and legally permitted to fund an entire campaign and essentially to purchase an elected office.” — Marc Tracy, of Tablet, on the Las Vegas Sands CEO’s preferred investment of the moment — which has now swelled to just shy of $19 million, 
Rushing in where angels fear to tread, Kazuo Okada (right) has broken ground on his $2 billion, two-casino megaresort in the Philippines. You may remember the project as a bitter point of contention between Okada and erstwhile BFF Steve Wynn, who alleges that Okada tried to drag Wynn Resorts into it, by hook or by crook. Now Okada says he “is in talks to get a local partner.” That’s a euphemism for, “I’m in too deep, would somebody please bail me out?” We’ve heard close variants of it from Morgans Hotel Group, when it overpaid for the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, and from Las Vegas Sands when it had committed to a retail mall at Sands Bethlehem and found money running short. The fact that Okada is rattling his tin cup up and down the archipelago speaks to the leeriness major gaming operators display toward the Filipino gambling industry. Genting‘s Hong Kong subsidiary is pursuing a casino of its own … but is spreading the risk among a multiplicity of partners.
Contrary to what the Washington Post reported and what Clark County GOP Chairman Dave Gibbs told The Associated Press, the man runs Las Vegas Sands says he had little or nothing to do with the rescheduling of Saturday’s Nevada Republican caucus out of deference to Orthodox Jews. (Turns out that Seventh Day Adventists will also benefit from the newly extended caucus schedule.) In a well-sourced Howard Stutz story for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Through his spokesman, Ron Reese, Adelson denies having “involvement” or even “input,” and didn’t “personally offer” (as Stutz puts it) to host the caucus at the Adelson Educational Campus. Adelson was at a meeting where Philip Kantor, an Orthodox member of the school’s board, raised the issue and that the mogul also called state GOP Chairwoman Amy Tarkanian regarding the matter.
Last week, Mandalay Bay hosted an advance screening of the pilot episode of Luck, which debuted on HBO last night. If it was hard to follow on the ginormous MBay screen, I cannot imagine how impenetrable it seemed on a humble TV set. Before the showing, an HBO executive rhapsodized about the “elevated writing” of showrunner David Milch (Deadwood), which expressed itself in three ways: A) obscure gambling argot; B) conversations about goat testicles and the like; C) “Fuck you, you dumb fucking dumbfuck” sorts of badinage. Set in the demimonde of horseracing, Luck manages to simultaneously deglamorize the Sport of Kings and make it viscerally thrilling. It owes the excitement to director/executive producer Michael Mann‘s fondness for tiny HD cameras, which enable him to obtain all manner of improbable in-race perspectives (sort of like being Jiminy Cricket on a jockey’s shoulder). Unfortunately, -
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