Station diversifies; Caesars retrenches

Scott Roeben of VitalVegas continues to beat the mainstream media to the breaking stories in Sin City. His latest scoop has Apex nightclub at the Palms seeing a coup d’etat. Clique Hospitality is gone and now Station Casinos will try running the club itself. This isn’t Station’s long suit (Remember Cherry at Red Rock Station? Probably not.), so we’ll be keen to see how the experiment works. Meanwhile, Station, don’t sell that land below South Point just yet. A Major League Baseball stadium is rumored for the area. Too bad for Station it bailed out of the Aliante area, now that Universal Studios is mooted to be considering a theme park in that (very remote) part of the valley. Boyd Gaming must be licking its chops.

Also, Caesars Entertainment is reeling back the extension of the Caesars brand into non-gaming properties outside of Las Vegas. Indeed, the whole department tasked for this is said to be being dismantled. We think Caesars is premature and might want to keep the whole thing on ice until Eldorado Resorts arrives and decides what it wants to do with the quintessential name in gaming.

* There was a setback in federal court this week for the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians and the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation. In a ruling by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, the state won a request for dismissal of a lawsuit over non-banked card games. The tribes wanted the state to crack down on them but the court said it wasn’t the right forum. The court ruled that “it lacked the power to require the State to enforce the law under the tribes’ compacts … the court found the compacts are not the vehicle under which the tribes can force the State to enforce the law, and protect their exclusive right to offer house-banked card games,” according to a press release that tried to spin the development as a win for the tribes. Since the lawsuit was not dismissed with prejudice, the three tribes will live to fight card rooms another day. The next step is an appeal of the ruling to the Ninth Circuit.

* Housekeepers are the invisible force that keeps the hospitality industry running. However, they are not tipped, even though many of them are living just over the poverty line. (I plead guilty to being a stiff.) Thanks to the Culinary Union, hotels in Las Vegas do better than most but the better is always the enemy of the good.

* The body count is in from MGM 2020 and there were 1,070 casualties, 881 of them in Las Vegas. According to Sheldon Adelson‘s Las Vegas Review-Journal, the unlucky employees are confronted with a “tight hospitality market.” With massive budget cuts looming at Caesars too (even though it has 450 positions open at the moment), this is a hellish time to be in the Sin City job market. Want to work in “learning delivery” at MGM? Fughedaboudit.

* Congratulations to the Nevada Lege for continuing to move the Silver State into the forefront of tolerance.