The Associated Press is now reporting that Harrah’s has agreed to take the $90 a share offer from Texas Pacific and Apollo Management Group. Since the middle of last week, the company has been holding a marathon board meeting in New York, absent CEO Gary Loveman, to negotiate the final details of the buyout.

Working out the details has been so difficult that the originally scheduled two-day meeting have dragged on through the weekend and an official announcement is not expected until Tuesday.

The big winners will be people who rushed in and bought Harrah’s shares when the deal was announced and the stock was below $80, although there still seems to be plenty of room for arbitrage with the shares this afternoon sitting around $83. The market still seems skeptical that the deal will get over all the regulatory hurdles.

And that Penn National strategy together with the deadline seems to have finally got things moving. It was hard to take the cash-and-stock offer from the racino operator seriously but it was enough to kick talks into high gear and get the deal done at a significant premium to the original stock price.

We’re still betting the deal is not going to see a big sell-off of Harrah’s assets but that the management will want to take the longer-term view and develop its assets on the Strip and abroad without the analysts and journalists second-guessing its moves every quarter. Time will tell.