[fnord_too]

You all are thinking too deeply here I think. Party has had to cut revenue forecasts twice and there stock is plummeting. I think a lot of the move was driven by despracy. They obviously had the casino in mind, but rushed it out incomplete and ahead of schedule. Why? Probably because they are lookng for a way to stem the bleeding and are a bit on tilt. (Tilt happens in business, too. When Time Warner made their huge AOL merger blunder, they only did two weeks of analysis. I had to write that case in grad school, and I spent a couple hours doing the financials and came to the conclusion that Time Warner was on crack, and they are a much bigger, more experienced company than Party.)

Whether this turns out to be a good move or a bad move remains to be seen, but I think it was a poorly thought out and high variance move. Honestly, why did they do it at peak hours? That is just stupid. Why make a sneak attack on the skins instead of just warning them (which is my supposition)? That increases their legal vulnerability, even if splitting was within the contracts they had. Whatever they had in mind (there motive is necessarily to increase shareholder wealth) there execution seems very shaky. I don't think things are going quite the way they planned at Party (in general, that is) and I don't think they know quite how to deal with it.