The Bastard Children of Harrah's

(UPDATE, 8/7/07: See this post for a clarification of a portion of this post disputed by Ms. Jones.)

So I'm working on a feed to an immigration-bill story for Saturday's New York Times and was interviewing Harrah's VP Jan Jones on their company's reaction to the legislation's failure. While I had her on the line, I asked why the Imperial Palace and Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon (nee Barbary Coast) are not present on the Harrah's website or integrated into the Total Rewards program, the company's groundbreaking frequent-players club.

Jones was surprisingly frank: "If you owned Imperial Palace, would you want it in your rewards club?"

Ouch.

She told me that they bought both properties for their land -- no surprise there -- and that the two bastard properties will limp along in their purgatory status for at least another year before, more likely than not, perishing from this earth. For one thing, she said, the cost of integrating those properties into the system would be too much to bother. And the company is likely to announce whatever its Big Idea is for all of that property from Bill's to Harrah's next summer, after the LBO is completed.

One challenge, she said, is how to do something ambitious while taking properties -- the IP, and Bill's -- off-line. It sounds like Flamingo Las Vegas is less likely to meet an implosion rig. Consider this exchange:

Friess: You've been putting a lot of money into the Flamingo lately, so it's unlikely you'd knock that down, right?
Jones: Yes.

She said the IP and Bill's do produce modest profits for the company. But I suspect that it's shutting down Harrah's (if they ever do; see clarifying post here) that would be the bigger cash-flow problem. Should be interesting since, despite their enormous status in Vegas, Harrah's has never built a single building in Las Vegas. Everything they have has been acquired.

BILL'S PHOTO COURTESY OF RATEVEGAS.COM.

Is Poker Over?

I don't really think so, but I have been surprised in the past couple of days to find my editors at The New York Times and Newsweek completely uninterested in next week's start of the World Series of Poker's Main Event. All good fads must come to an end, sure, but I suspect that the ESPN's WSOP broadcasts get better ratings than some of the sports covered regularly by the Times -- tennis and NHL hockey come to mind. Plus, this year has so many great themes going on, what with the return of poker black sheep Jamie Gold (the NYT did let me break the story of his confessing to breaking rules last year) and the superhot question of just how the Congressional ban on Americans using their credit cards to play poker online will lower the WSOP Main Event population. Only USA Today really seems to "get" it -- they've run a special section at the onset of WSOP Season two years in a row.

We still care, of course, and I've got a really big piece on the Venus-and-Serena of poker, Annie Duke and Howard Lederer, coming out in this Saturday's Boston Globe. (They grew up in Concord, N.H., part of the Globe's New England reach.)

We've now posted both the Duke and Lederer interviews, both of them with a lot of interesting discussion of their odd childhood, their careers and the state of poker these days. Hear Annie here or right-click here to download it and listen to it whenever you want. And hear Howard here or right-click here to download it.

What do you think? Is disinterest from the mainstream media a sign that poker, at least as a national craze, has run its course?

"The Strip" is LIVE at 7 pm PT With Annie Duke!

Join us live at LVROCKS.COM to hear "The Strip" be recorded and chat with us! Plus, with the World Series of Poker's Main Event in the offing, we get into the spirit of the season with a revealing interview with the world's most successful female poker player, Annie Duke. Hear what she has to say about Jamie Gold, Ben Affleck, her strange upbringing and those nasty Internet rumors about her.

Come on down. Or catch the podcast on Thursday. Your choice!

Pigeon Warfare

Amy of the "Grits to Glitz" podcast did this. It's very funny.

Three Books You Should Read

This is going to sound really odd, but I just finished three books that should never be read back to back to back and came away surprised by all three in different, pleasant ways.

1. "Annie Duke: How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker." The world's most successful female poker star writes a memoir accessible not just to poker fans but to anyone intrigued by how a pioneering woman navigates through a very tough male-dominated profession. What's more, Annie Duke isn't afraid to discuss her personal travails, namely an in-depth chronicle of her life of panic attacks. Catch my interview with her and her famous brother, Howard Lederer, on "The Strip" this upcoming week.

2. "Drop Dead Beautiful." Bestselling author Jackie Collins' next potboiler is being launched this weekend in Vegas, where it's largely set as a tale involving an effort to halt the opening of the heroine's new megaresort. It was campy, silly, utterly addictive and so full of sex that there's a blowjob on, I think, the fifth page -- and Ms. Collins reveals on this week's episode of "The Strip" that her publisher wanted that scene to open the book but she demurred. What restraint! My aunt tells me we don't call this "trash" anymore; it's now known as "beach reading." Mmhmm. Hear the Jackie Collins interview here or right-click to save it to your computer to hear at your leisure.

3. "The Year of Magical Thinking." So then I moved on, naturally, to Joan Didion's National Book Award Winner. I had hesitated to read what seemed likely to be an unrelentingly depressing memoir of the year in which her husband died and her daughter lay deathly ill, but it turned out to be a lovely, sensitive and remarkably thoughtful meditation on the experience of grief and the strange things it does to normal, sane people. Didion forced me to ponder who the great relationships of my life are whose death would launch me into that kind of mourning; in other words, a book on death and loss succeeded in prompting me to take stock and feel grateful for life, mine and those around me. That said, the book did drag a bit near the end, even at 226 pages, and became a little redundant. Well worth it, but mercifully succinct.

So now I'm low on books. Any suggestions?

Wow, That Sucks

Doing some research, I happened to come across the website for the Marriott's Grand Chateau, a timeshare-hotel near the MGM Grand on Harmon Avenue. They're building a second tower, apparently, and the felt they needed to warn guests who are paying $200+ a night to stay here:

The resort will be under construction with an estimated completion date of 2016. Construction of the second tower has begun. Construction hours will range from 4:30am-5pm M - Sa. Although noise, dust, debris and views of construction will be prevalent and somewhat severe at times, the amenities and facilities of our completed tower will be fully operational. Features and amenities are subject to change.

Uh, 2016? It'll take them EIGHT

MORE YEARS to build the thing,

working 12 hours a day, six days

a week? What's wrong with this?

Also, this room is FUG.

Vegas and High Tech

Yesterday's R-J had a front-page story about a Las Vegas City Council effort to create a citywide wi-fi Internet hot zone. It's interesting and largely irrelevant to tourists on account of the fact that the Strip is not in the city of Las Vegas and the hotels and their Internet service providers would never allow such an effort to cut into the cash cow that is the extortion that is their daily Internet fees. (That, of course, was necessary now that so few hotel guests in the age of cell phones pay up the age-old scam that is the fees to use the hotel telephone.)

Anyhow, it's Benjamin Spillman's cheapshot lead that bugged me:

"A place where coinless slot machines are considered high technology is moving closer to the ranks of cities with widespread wireless Internet access."

Now wait a sec. Is the implication here that Vegas is some sort of Luddite state? That the best technology we're known for is ticket-in/ticket-out? Really?

In actuality, Vegas is a fascinating proving ground and an unusual application for a long list of intriguing new technology that I've been writing about for many years. Here are just five of my favorites:

1. The e-Winebook at Charlie Palmer's Aureole. (See my Newsweek piece.) It's an Internet tablet that allows diners to search the ginormous wine selection by price, varietal, region and food pairing, then email themselves their selections so they can buy it again when they get home. And after it takes the sting out of the usually intimidating experience of wading through the leather-bound brick of most wine lists, you can watch the wine angels via live, streaming video.

2. The Fountains at Bellagio. Nuff said.

3. The Theaters. The stage folds at Love, oscillates at Le Reve and O, spins at Ka. (See my NY Times piece on the Ka theater.) The chandelier plummets at Phantom. The backdrop is eye-popping for Celine/Elton. Amazing stuff, and nobody builds them like we do for several reasons I outline in this USA Today piece.

4. The Fremont Street Experience light show. See my Wired piece on it.

5. The Interactive Tabletops of Tabu. As predicted in my Wired piece on it years ago, the technology is spreading. It's now used to project images near Shark Reef, the MGM Grand Convention Center and during Ka.

Oh, and the slot machine technology is pretty amazing, too, particularly the advances made in video graphics and interactivity.

I'm sure I've missed a few. I may want to do a piece on this, so anyone got any other favorites?