New Casino, With Live Poker, Opens At Mohegan Sun

UNCASVILLE - Bruce "Two Dogs" Bozsum waved a feather over a smoking bowl and offered a series of ceremonial incantations, including thanks to "The Creator" for "good things you have given us" and "good things to come."

Then the chairman of the Mohegan Tribe helped do something Native Americans have become expert at — he opened a new casino.

In this case, on Friday morning, it was a 64,000-square-foot addition to Mohegan Sun called Casino of the Wind, the latest piece of a $925 million expansion intended to keep up with nearby Foxwoods Resort Casino, which in May opened a $700 million expansion called MGM Grand.

Both casinos are trying to position themselves as national destinations and prepare for the potential emergence of rivals elsewhere in New England and the Mid-Atlantic.

Photos With Casino of the Wind comes the revival of live poker at Mohegan Sun, a game it abandoned in 2003, citing insufficient demand; it has since become phenomenally popular nationwide.

Foxwoods, which has offered live poker since opening in 1992, still operates a much larger poker operation, but Mohegan Sun will now be in a position to lure away at least some of that business and broaden its overall appeal.

"When we closed our poker room, poker exploded," Mohegan Sun Chief Executive Mitchell Etess acknowledged Friday after the Casino of the Wind opened to hundreds of patrons who had lined up well in advance amid banks of blinking and buzzing slot machines in the adjacent Casino of the Sky.

Etess predicted the new gaming space would be just as beneficial in a slow economy as in more prosperous times.

"As people are making hard choices about where to spend their discretionary income and where to recreate, it's great that we have something new for them to see," he said.

The principal new offering in Casino of the Wind is the 42-table poker room, where nearly 24 suspended televisions broadcast everything from nature scenes to baseball games to CNN.

Besides poker, Casino of the Wind also offers tables for games available elsewhere at Mohegan Sun, including blackjack, roulette and craps, and slot machines galore, 650 of them. A 16,000-square-foot restaurant, Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, is scheduled to open near the poker room next month. It was still under construction Friday, just outside the new poker room.

Mohegan officials expect the overall expansion, called Project Horizon, to be finished by 2010, when more stores and restaurants will open, along with a 39-story hotel with more than 900 rooms and a 1,500-seat music hall.

The opening of the poker room alone was enough to draw hundreds to Mohegan Sun well before lunch Friday, the first day of a long holiday weekend.

Nick Economopoulous, a retired accounting teacher from Wallingford, was one of them.

Sandwiched between two rows of Game King slot machines outside Casino of the Wind, he said he was present for the last day of live poker at Mohegan Sun in 2003 and had been playing at Foxwoods since.

"I was right there at the end," he said, "and I'm going to be right there at the beginning."

Even as Mohegan proceeds with its Uncasville expansion, it is laying the groundwork for a major casino in Palmer, Mass., about 90 miles to the northwest. Massachusetts does not yet permit casinos, and last March rejected a proposal that would allow them. But developers, Indian tribes and many elected officials predict a new legislative effort there in 2009 to authorize them.

Mohegan wants to be ready and has a deal with a partner for 150 acres of land in Palmer.

While Mohegan Sun or Foxwoods might take away some of its own existing business by establishing another casino nearby, that's better than the alternative, said Clyde Barrow, a casino industry expert with the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

"If you're going to lose business to competing casinos, you should lose it to yourself," he said.

But it wouldn't necessarily come to that, he said. Several studies suggest there is as much as $1.5 billion in "unmet demand" for gambling in New England alone.

Mohegan has read those studies and done its own due diligence.

"We don't use the crystal ball," Bozsum said Friday.

Mohegan Sun management is planning a monthlong grand opening for Casino of the Wind in October. The casino has lined up major musical acts, including The Who and Janet Jackson, to perform then, partly as an effort to draw more people to Casino of the Wind. Comedian Robin Williams is also scheduled to perform.


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News Added: 30 August, 2008

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