Foxwoods' bingo hall about to turn 30
Mashantucket — Mark Sockbeson, director of bingo operations at Foxwoods Resort Casino, showed a reporter a yellowed newspaper clipping last week.
It was a 2001 article about the 15th anniversary of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe’s high-stakes bingo hall.
The article quoted Michael Holder, then the Foxwoods bingo czar, who dispelled rumors the hall was closing.
“Not true,” Holder said. “We absolutely look forward to another 15 years — and more.”
Well, bingo.
Foxwoods’ Bingo Hall turns 30 next week, and no one’s suggesting it won’t be around for many more years to come.
When the casino holds its annual Firecracker Bingo event Saturday, July 2, you can look for the 225,000-square-foot hall’s 3,600 seats to fill up in no time, Sockbeson said.
There’s apt to be a line of people waiting for the doors to open at 7 a.m. — three-and-a-half hours before the games begin.
That’s pretty much the way it went on July 5, 1986, the scorcher of a Saturday on which the Mashantuckets introduced southeastern Connecticut to high-stakes bingo.
Foxwoods’ gaming tables wouldn’t appear until six years later, slot machines a year after that.
“It was a very hot, muggy day and we got so concerned about those people that we started bringing out water to them,” Holder told a reporter in 2011, when Foxwoods’ bingo turned 25.
On that first day, the bingo hall, less than half the size it is today, turned away hundreds of people.
It’s been proclaimed the biggest bingo hall in the Northeast, the country and likely, Sockbeson said, the world.
In terms of capacity, it has no equal, he said, and it’s the only bingo hall that’s paid out a $1 million jackpot.
The Firecracker event will again offer a jackpot of that magnitude as well as regular game payouts of $30,000 and $50,000 in cash door prizes. Admission is $500.
Kenny Reels, the former Mashantucket tribal chairman and current vice chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Gaming Commission, recalled that the bingo hall was “the catalyst” for the tribe’s early success, the “economic engine” that put it on the road to self-sufficiency.
“At the beginning, nobody knew how big it would be,” he said. “We were just looking for a vehicle we could use and it became the most profitable bingo hall in the world.
“We’re proud of it.”
During the week, the hall fills to about 40 percent of capacity during each of its two-a-day sessions, according to Sockbeson. On weekends, it’s 75 to 80 percent full.
Morning sessions draw an older crowd, including many retirees. Some younger people — those 18 and older can enter the hall — show up in the evenings.
“It’s a great value,” Sockbeson said. “We actually charge less (admission) today than we did when we opened. We only had five sessions a week then compared to the 14 now.”
But it’s the game’s social aspect that enables it to endure.
Early-morning arrivals begin kibitzing over breakfast, sharing stories about their families and lives.
Sockbeson, moving through the cavernous, 225,000-square-foot hall, greets guests he’s been seeing for years, many of them seated in the same places day after day. One day last week, he encountered a regular in a new location.
“Today, she happened to be up front,” he said. “It threw me.”
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