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Bingo on long decline since casinos opened

Operators say game not dying, but numbers down

John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 31, 2006 at midnight

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B-I-N-G-O is in T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

For decades, the game of chance has been a reliable backbone of nonprofit fundraisers, yielding millions annually for everything from band instruments, to baseball uniforms, to scholarships, to teachers salaries.

But in the nearly 15 years since the advent of legalized gambling in Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek, bingo has been on a long losing streak.

Consider the numbers:

• In 1996, bingo players wagered $222 million in Colorado. Last year, that number totaled about $126 million. The figure includes pull-tab games known as "pickles" for the pickle jars they are stored in.

• At the end of 2001, there were 1,428 active bingo licenses in Colorado. By the end of last year, that number had dropped to 1,173.

• More recently, the number of bingo players statewide has dropped, from 632,000 in the first quarter of 2005 to 565,000 in the first quarter of 2006.

At the same time, business is booming in casino towns. Last year, revenue in the three mountain casino towns reached $755 million, up from nearly $412 million in 1996.

Smoke and bingo

Ken Harrell saw the numbers on the walls of a bingo hall he ran for two years in Arvada. Like many halls on the metro area's west side, his Jackpot Bingo felt the competition from casinos more keenly than those elsewhere.

In 2004, when Arvada adopted a smoking ban, Harrell said he was faced with a choice: install about $150,000 in air-filtration systems or go smoke-free. He chose the latter and spent about $1,500 cleaning all the tobacco residue from his hall.

It didn't work. The average number of patrons dropped from about 110 each night to about 35. He closed the hall.

"We were struggling the entire time, but that was the death knell," said Harrell, who went back full time to his other business of selling medical imaging equipment.

"I was losing money for two years, so the city maybe did me a favor by cutting my throat instead of letting me breathe to death."

Old-school bingo

Not everyone in the world of Colorado bingo is struggling. Some games - particularly those run by nonprofits who own their own hall - are managing just fine.

There is no better evidence than a recent Saturday night at the St. Louis School cafeteria in Englewood.

On a day when high temperatures broke the 100-degree mark, Austin Gomes counted about 200 people packed into 14 rows of tables to play bingo.

Not just any bingo game. This is old-school bingo. No fancy electronic devices. No bells and whistles. And on this night, no cigarette smoke. Just 14 rows of people intent on the monotone voice of the caller as he read out the next ball.

"B 49 . . . 49 under the B."

The swamp coolers blew chilled air over the crowd, a mix of old and young players. There were mothers and daughters and in some cases, three generations of players present. On the wall hung the portraits of priests. The current pastor stopped in to chat with players before saying Saturday night Mass.

A man on the far end of the room perked up.

"Bingo! Hallelujah!"

Another game begins.

People have played bingo at St. Louis every Saturday night for 27 years. And Gomes - a genial white-haired man with strong opinions on bingo - has presided over those games from the beginning.

Back then, the crowds were so large that the game was played on two floors with the overflow players occupying the gymnasium on the floor above the cafeteria. Those were the golden days of bingo.

Next-generation bingo

Is bingo dying? The people running the games say they don't think so. But they readily admit, their game is not what it used to be.

"Bingo is on the decline - there's no two ways about it," said Gomes, who serves on the bingo/raffle advisory board to the secretary of state's office, which regulates the game.

"There's not enough money to go around, and they still have a lot to offer up on the hill," he added, referring to the mountain-town casinos.

But Gomes makes a distinction between bingo halls that rent space to nonprofit groups and groups such as his own church, which holds its own game in its own hall.

The latter are doing OK, he said. Last year, for example, the once-a-week game at St. Louis cleared a net profit of about $50,000, which went toward teacher salaries and upkeep of the buildings.

Nick Pizzuti, another advisory board member from Berthoud, says the game is in decline.

"I think bingo, in a sense, is dying," Pizzuti said. "I'm not saying there aren't as many players out there. I'm saying they don't have the money to play as often."

Corky Kyle, a lobbyist who represents the Colorado Charitable Bingo Association, said part of the problem is generational.

"Bingo players are dying," Kyle said. "We're not replacing the older players with the younger players."

He estimated that the average age of bingo players is early 50s.

He said another challenge facing bingo is the state law that requires all games to be run by volunteers only. Increasingly, nonprofits are having a hard time finding enough volunteers to staff a game.

"What happens is you find a core group of volunteers and then you just use them up," Kyle said. The association is pushing for law changes to allow halls to pay some bingo workers.

Some wins and a loss

The association represents six bingo hall owners and eight nonprofit groups. Over the past few years, the group has successfully lobbied for several changes to draw a younger audience.

Among these are:

• Use of electronic bingo devices.

• Progressive jackpots, meaning if no one wins a game, the prize money carries over into the next game and gets progressively higher.

• A higher limit on what a player can win in a single game. The limit had been $1,500. A new set of rules proposed by the Secretary of State's Office would raise that to $2,500.

But the group lost one of its biggest battles, an effort to have bingo games exempted from the statewide smoking ban, an exemption granted to casinos.

Now that the ban has been in effect for nearly a month, bingo operators are no longer as worried about losing customers. In fact, a few believe they've gained some back.

Pizutti noticed the change almost as soon as the law went into effect on July 1. "I've gotten a different crowd of people who say, 'I couldn't come down because of the smoke.' . . . And our smokers are faithful. They want to play."

The bingo faithful

During a break at a recent game, about 20 players at St. Louis headed outside to the parish parking lot to smoke, 15 feet away from the door.

Tiffany Pleiman said she smokes but is OK with the ban. "It was bad. It was horrible," she said of the smoke that once hung over the hall.

Pleiman has been coming to St. Louis bingo since she was 11 and attended school at St. Louis.

"It's cheap, and you can win a lot of money," she said.

Inside the hall, Mavis Abrahamson sat staring intently at her multiple cards as she daubed numbers with purple ink.

Abrahamson, who once won $6,000 in one night, said there is no place else she would rather be.

"I like it whether I win or not," she said. "They call that first number, and my heart starts beating faster."

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