A third company has decided that Aztar could make it a big boy on the Strip, reports Bloomberg. Now that Ameristar Casinos and Colony Capital are both in the race, Pinnacle’s takeover deal appears to be in tatters - at least at the original $38 per share offer is.

On Friday, Colony offered $41 per share and over the weekend Ameristar upped the ante to $42 per share, valuing Aztar at $2.25 billion. The big prizes for all that money are the Tropicana properties on the Strip and in Atlantic City. The big thing is undoubtedly the Strip property, which has fallen into that awkward category of too old to be a megaresort and too good to be imploded, although all the buyers seem to envision implosion eventually.

“We are willing to make this superior proposal because we believe Aztar’s assets have their highest potential within Ameristar and because we believe we can maximize their value,” Craig H. Neilsen, Ameristar’s CEO, said in the statement announcing his company’s bid.

Colony has specialized in buying distressed hotel properties and is currently upgrading the Las Vegas Hilton. And as the Business Press reported last month, Pinnacle CEO Dan Lee saw the purchase as the way to put his company into the big league. So now the question is: How high can they go?

And reports Bloomberg, the mergers and acquisitions business is booming everywhere as companies use acquisitions as a growth strategy. The news service’s data show that 5,800 takeovers valued at $859 billion were announced in the first three months of 2006. And that’s the fastest start since the dot.com craze.