Connecticut Casinos, Residents Are Winners as NYC Casino Bidding Ends
One of the most overlooked angles regarding the mid-December 2025 decision by New York State gaming regulators in awarding its three New York City-area casino licenses is that the two tribal casinos in Connecticut come across as big beneficiaries.
Of course, that means good news for Connecticut residents as well, because fears that the city licenses might significantly cut into annual casino tax revenues in their state now are unlikely to come to fruition.
The state of casino gambling in Connecticut has long been perhaps the most stable situation in the nation. The Mashantucket Pequot tribe opened Foxwoods Resort and Casino in Ledyard, CT in 1993, and the Mohegan tribe debuted its Mohegan Sun Casino in nearby Montville four years later.
Since then - no more news in Connecticut, which to this day still does not feature a single commercial casino. Neighboring Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and upstate New York offer such gambling destinations, but all pale in comparison to Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun - each of which feature more than 300,000 square feet of gaming space. In fact, only the WinStar Casino in Oklahoma has a larger gaming footprint in the U.S.
But by early 2025, proposals had been announced for no fewer than five mega-casino resorts in Manhattan, each costing north of $1 billion.
At that point, the two Connecticut regional casino giants seemed like they might have some stiff competition ahead for the Northeast gambling market. However, all five Manhattan bids were eliminated due to local community opposition.
Additionally, the northernmost of the 11 formal bids - at Yonkers Raceway in Westchester County, N.Y. - was a late withdrawal by the property's owners. That left only a Bally's casino project in The Bronx and a pair of Queens borough casinos - one adjacent to the New York Mets' baseball stadium and La Guardia Airport, and the other being an expansion of the existing Aqueduct Raceway racino. All three were then granted licenses by the New York State Gaming Facility Location Board.
None of the three authorized projects are expected to be completed until mid-2030, and gamblers who live anywhere north of New York City would figure to be leery of driving in traffic towards the planned Hard Rock casino site near the hectic airport.
Bally's, meanwhile, has run into challenges in financing its planned permanent casino in Chicago, leading to some industry concern about whether the same fiscal hurdles could occur in The Bronx as well.
Placing the Connecticut casino dollars in context
Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun each have decades-old compacts with the state to turn over 25% of annual slot machine gross revenues, in exchange for the right additionally to offer full-scale Las Vegas-quality table games and also a guarantee that no commercial casinos will be approved by state officials.
Those agreements amount to about $200 million in revenue per year to the state, split almost evenly between the two casinos.
In September 2021, Connecticut lawmakers and Gov. Ned Lamont legalized mobile sports betting and online casino gaming, with the tribes agreeing to turn over 18% of the latter gross revenue and 13.75% of online sports betting revenue.
That leads each year to just over $25 million in additional state revenue from sports betting, as well as nearly $50 million annually from iGaming.
The two gambling resorts - located only 15 minutes apart in the southeastern part of the state - each are massive in size.
Foxwoods has six casino properties; about 7,000 slot machines; four hotels with a combined total of more than 2,200 rooms; the world's largest bingo hall; and a pair of 18-hole golf courses as part of its almost unfathomable 1,600-acre footprint.
Mohegan Sun has two enormous casinos on its 240-acre site with a total of more than 1,500 rooms; nearly 4,000 slot machines; an 18-hole course annually ranked by Golfweek as among the 50 best casino property golf courses; and a 10,000-seat arena that has long been home to the WNBA's Connecticut Sun women's basketball team.
In September 2025, USA Today newspaper's Reader's Choice Awards rated Mohegan Sun as the best casino in the nation for slot machine play and placed it second for Best Casino Hotel; Best Players Club; and Best Casino Outside of Las Vegas. Foxwoods, meanwhile, was selected as No. 3 in the latter category.
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