Bally’s Shares Details of Delusional Fever Dream, Everyone Falls for It

By Scott Roeben, on October 07 2025
4 min read 13 comments
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Bally’s Corp. recently shared a new rendering of its plans for the Tropicana site.

It is easily the most unhinged, delusional, whimsical folly we have ever witnessed in more than a decade of covering Las Vegas, and our town’s history is littered with unmitigated WTF.

The worst part isn’t that Bally’s has foisted this nonsense on the world (given it will never, ever happen). The worst part is how the vast majority of media outlets reported it with a straight face, implicitly enabling this asinine, mushroom-driven con job.

Bally’s prompt to A.I. image generator: “Just put everything in it.”

Here’s what’s being shared as though it were based in reality: Bally’s Corp. released a phased development plan for a new resort at the former Trop site which will include a 3,000-room hotel (two towers), casino, 2,500-seat entertainment venue and 500,000 square feet of retail, all built around an imagined ballpark. Construction on the “integrated resort” is slated to start in the first half of 2026, with the first phase (entry plaza and parking) opening in time for the ballpark’s 2028 debut. The project is estimated to cost $3 billion.

You think we were kidding about mushrooms?

Then you haven’t seen the hype video shared by Bally’s.

To their credit, the chances of a venue featuring trained iguanas jumping through rings of fire is roughly the same as anything in the Bally’s rendering ever coming to pass.

The chances aren’t just remote, they do not exist, at all.

As we have said for months now, Bally’s Corp. is the perfect partner for the A’s, the MLB team busy building a ballpark on the Trop site despite being a billion dollars-plus short of funding.

Bullshit loves company.

Shout-out to all those sportsball players looking west into the Sun when they’re at bat. They LOVE that.

Everything shared by Bally’s Corp. is almost too absurd to demolish. Almost.

Let’s do the boring work of being more specific about why the Bally’s Corp. resort is never happening.

First, Bally’s doesn’t own the dirt and they’ve been selling off the dirt they did have.

Bally’s has leaned on sale-leasebacks with Gaming & Leisure Properties (or GLPI, the company that owns the Trop site) to raise cash, most recently selling the real estate of Bally’s Kansas City and Bally’s Shreveport to pay down its debt. An asset-light, rent-heavy balance sheet isn’t how you fund a ground-up megaresort.

Fitch cut Bally’s to a B- rating, citing high leverage and “execution risk” tied to its Chicago casino that has been an ongoing debacle.

GLPI isn’t bailing Bally’s Corp. out again.

The Bally’s rendering is a hodgepodge of ideas, none cohesive, and it doesn’t seem to take into account the footprint of the ballpark.

Groundwork for the alleged A’s ballpark has consumed much of the Trop site. A cost-creeping ballpark crammed into a resort complicates phasing, access, utilities and construction windows. It’s a nightmare.

Height, acreage and room count math ensure no resort will be profitable on the Trop site if there’s a ballpark built there.

Why?

The Tropicana corner sits inside Harry Reid International’s airspace. Anything 200 feet-plus triggers FAA review. That means Bally’s Corp. can’t build upward to have more rooms, the only thing that could make a resort viable.

Render now, make excuses later.

The CEO of Bally’s, Soo Kim, said, “It’s not lost upon me that 75 percent of Vegas revenues are non-gaming.” We’ll say it. There’s actually a lot lost on Soo Kim.

Las Vegas runs on rooms, casinos and conventions. Betting that shops, restaurants and bars, along with retail shops (there’s already a massive new retail mall, BLVD, nearby) and entertainment can carry a height-capped resort (next to a stadium that will ensure traffic is FUBAR on event days) isn’t in any way realistic.

Could Bally’s Corp. find an investor or backer to make their muddled plans a reality? No. Could they build smaller? No, not profitably.

Based upon the facts and context, and not gushing news stories, the Bally’s Corp. resort plans are aspirational at best. In reality, this project is simply not happening.

Prediction: This isn’t the last time you’ll be looking at this image.

All right, kudos to Bally’s rendering artist for the Easter egg.

Inappropriate.

The lack of reality is almost funny, the lack of skepticism on the part of the media is genuinely alarming. We’ve seen this before with All Net Resort and myriad make-believe projects. In that case, it took a decade of us whistling in a wind tunnel before journalists realized it was all a scam with actual victims.

Very few media outlets or journalists have questioned the sanity of Bally’s Corp. or its leadership. One exception is David McKee, who seems to be one of the few keeping his eye on the ball. The gumption! Read another McKee story while you’re at it.

None of this makes any sense.

It’s like the A’s projecting 33,000 fans at every game. It’s just made up, a fantasy based on vapor and the belief people (including investors and financial institutions) are gullible and, frankly, stupid.

Yes, we’re living in a post-truth world, but this level of sheer audacity and unashamed codswallop is rare. Oh, yes, we said “codswallop.” That’s Brit for bullshit.

The Bally’s and A’s plans are snake oil, plain and simple. It’s faking it until they make it. It’s a ploy to get support from investors, or to inflate the value of their assets (the team or the development rights of the Trop site).

There’s no magical money miracle in the making. The A’s have been looking for investors for years now, Bally’s is stretched to the limit and is a terrible credit risk. We only really care about what happens in Vegas, but it’s worth watching the various messes Bally’s is involved in elsewhere, further bolstering the fact a Bally’s resort on the Trop site is as likely as Carrot Top getting a comb through is hair.

The ultimate outcome? Hard to say, but everything we’ve heard to-date means we get an idle site for years to come, until a serious owner buys the A’s and Bally’s Corp. is out of the picture so serious people can build a resort, assuming Las Vegas emerges from its tourism slump (nobody should be adding room inventory to a town that has more supply than demand, fingers crossed, Hard Rock).

Shame on the media for amplifying these long cons.

A world without journalism is a world without checks and balances. Swindlers get to ply their trade without resistance or accountability.

In the absence of real journalism, the grifters write the headlines.