The Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas has been an icon for tourists traveling to the Strip. The property opened the day after Christmas in 1946, despite the fact that it wasn’t yet complete. Mobster Bugsy Siegel and his partners opened the hotel with just 105 rooms, hoping the grand event would attract business that would recoup cost overruns and help finance the rest of construction. The Flamingo was to be a new kind of luxury for Vegas, a full resort that featured a nine-hole golf course; tennis, squash and handball courts; a trapshooting range and extensive landscaping. Its high-end clientele…

Newsday – Britney Spears has begun her early retirement in Las Vegas with a show that looks strikingly like the eye-popping Cirque du Soleil productions found elsewhere on the Strip. The debut of Spears’ long-term casino gig Friday kept an audience of about 4,500 on their feet for about 90 minutes. The young-for-Vegas crowd was there for the danceable hits and the spectacle, which included acrobatics, a ring of fire, confetti, a live band, frenetic costume changes and a frequently airborne Spears. The show’s production values are unusually high for a casino residency, calling to mind the golden age of…

CNN – Macau hotels are outdoing themselves to prove they’re not just convenient places for gamblers to crash after a binge. Below are some Macau hotel gimmicks quirky enough to soften the crush of big losses at the tables. Michael Jackson-themed chamber escape game The Ponte 16 casino-resort not only has a gallery dedicated to more than 40 pieces of Michael Jackson memorabilia, it recently launched a chamber escape game with a horror theme reminiscent of the King of Pop’s “Thriller” video. The game features two chambers, dubbed Death Valley and Murder of Dance, in which you’ll have to unlock the doors to return to…

Bloomberg – Billionaire Sheldon Adelson said he is considering building individual integrated resorts in major European cities, 10 days after abandoning a plan to construct a $30 billion mega-resort in Spain. “I’m looking at a different model of doing Singapore-like or Japan-like or Korea-like individual IRs in individual cities,” Adelson said in an interview in Herzliya, Israel yesterday. “We will just take the major cities in Europe and see whether or not there is a possibility to pursue that.” Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS), the world’s largest casino operator, said Dec. 13 that it was dropping plans for what…

Independent.ie – Former England captain David Beckham has signed on to help promote Las Vegas Sands’ properties in Singapore and the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau. Sands said it hoped to cash in the retired footballer’s popularity in the region. The Las Vegas-based company is the largest casino operator in Macau, the center of the modern day gambling world. The deal may help Sands win attention in mainland China, where casinos are illegal and casino advertising is also banned. Football is hugely popular in China. In November Beckham posed for photographs with 100 children at the Venetian Macau and gave…

CNBC – In the 1800s, Portuguese colonists legalized gambling on a sleepy Chinese island called Macau. That once-lolling backwater has become a glittering center for tourism in Asia, with an estimated $40 billion to $45 billion in revenue this year, according to Union Gaming Advisors, a Las Vegas based consulting firm. Nearly two centuries later, Matsu, another island formation off China’s coast, wants to grab a piece of Asia’s rapid growth in gaming. But this time, big investors such as Bill Weidner, the former president of Las Vegas Sands, are leading the resort development. (Weidner had a bad break with…