The Pinball Capital of the World doesn't have a world-class place to play. Francis Wisniewski thinks he can fix that.
The Chicagoland area is the epicenter of pinball and has been for decades. Stern, Jersey Jack, Chicago Gaming Company, and American Pinball are all located within miles of each other. The area was once home to the factories of Bally, Williams, Gottlieb, and others. Some of the world's top competitive players call the region home.
And yet, the area lacks a premier destination to actually play pinball.
That's not to say Chicago doesn't have good pinball. Logan Arcade is well-regarded. ENTERRIUM hosts tournaments and has a collection of around 30 machines. But those are bars with pinball, not dedicated large-scale pinball venues in the mold of a District 82 in Wisconsin or a Next Level Pinball in Oregon. Francis Wisniewski sees the gap.
"It's supposed to be the pinball capital of the world, but like there's not a D82. There's not places [like] in Portland. There's so many better places around the globe or around the US than there is in Chicago."
Francis is betting that his new venue, The Pinball Capital, can fill it. When we last talked, he was sitting in a small room at the venue shortly after hosting the Illinois State Championship as a stress test. Through an open doorway behind him, I could see a large room full of pinball machines. He'd originally targeted an early February opening. Now he's waiting on a custom fire-rated door — a window being converted into a fire exit, fabricated in Wisconsin — that's pushed the grand opening to April 2nd.
He's frustrated, but in good spirits.
"It's like you think you know — I've been through a couple openings. I've had a bakery, you know, I've had a gym. Like you think you know where these things slow down — usually it's plumbing and bathrooms. And I just never put it on my plate that this was something to worry about."
Everything else — electrical, drywall, bathrooms, inspections — will be finished well before the fire exit.
Who is Francis Wisniewski?
Within the pinball community, Francis is probably best known as a co-owner of The Kickback in Middleton, Wisconsin. Outside of it, he's a serial entrepreneur whose career started on the trading floor at the Chicago exchanges — "Literally like Trading Places [the movie] was my daily life" — before he started his own trading firm in 2002. He still trades today, though now it's from home rather than the floor.
While trading has been the throughline, Francis has always had something else going. In 2011, he started Downsize Fitness, a nationally recognized fitness brand and "the only gym in the world where you had to be overweight to join." In 2016, he co-founded Warm Belly Bakery, an Insomnia Cookies-inspired concept. Neither worked out. Both were eventually shuttered. In each case, Francis said, he "opened second locations in the other two businesses way too early before the first one was profitable."
When he moved from Chicago to Wisconsin to start a pick-your-own farm called Warm Belly Farm, he struggled to find his people — until he found pinball. "I was having a hard time really making friends in Wisconsin until I went to IO [Arcade Bar] and then it was like, oh, all these guys that play pinball are, you know, they're kind of like me."
He then met Jim Schmock at Blue Moon, a bar in Madison where Jim ran 10 machines. They'd go on to partner on Kickback Bar in September 2024. Jim's family has been in the bar business for three generations in Madison, and he has a decade of experience running pins. He did most of the operational work at Kickback while Francis provided the financial backing and filled gaps in the game collection. The partnership gave Francis a crash course in running a pinball venue. He describes Jim as "a great mentor."
"I take a lot of risk from trading. Like, I'm a serial entrepreneur, but also calculated risks, and you know, you're going to fail a lot, right? And it's just part of it."
At home, he keeps a wedge-head Grand Slam that belonged to his trading mentor, who died last year at 95. The mentor's son gave it to him. It's the only machine he says he'll never put on a floor — sentimental value only.
The Build
Francis had been looking for a Chicago-area location for a while when he found the building in Stone Park, IL — 8,100 square feet with epoxy floors, high ceilings, and 800 amps of power. Jim recommended it over Francis's first choice because of those ceilings. The building was cheaper to buy than to lease, so Francis bought it outright. It's a seven-figure investment between the building, buildout, and game collection. But owning gives him more control and better cost structures — and after watching Kickback's landlord go bankrupt on a promised food hall buildout, he'd learned the hard way what happens when you depend on someone else's plan.
Francis plans to put roughly 120 machines on the floor: one-third modern, one-third solid state, one-third classic, along with a handful of arcade games. He's still hunting a few staples — an Addams Family in good condition, a Bond 60th — but the collection is mostly there, with 100 machines already set up as of January.
The Pinball Capital will operate on a free play model with daily admission at $20 and monthly memberships around $125.
The maintenance standard is where Francis is making his biggest bet. He's already hired a full-time tech and has backups lined up. He plans to keep around 10 machines in storage for hot-swaps so that a broken game gets pulled off the floor immediately rather than sitting there with an "out of order" sign. The Illinois State Championship put the model to the test — tournament directors went through every pop bumper and flipper on every game. Francis sees that as a feature, not a burden.
"If you can make the great players happy, then making the public happy is much easier."
The Track Record
There's one thing about Francis that's hard to ignore. He has a pattern: get excited about a new concept, pour himself into it, expand before the first thing is working. He has two shuttered businesses to show for it.
He says this time is different. No "Pinball Capital Boston." No franchise ambitions. He learned from the gym and the bakery. He was more patient with the real estate search, more deliberate with the buildout, more willing to lean on people like Jim who've done this before. He bought the building so he wouldn't be at the mercy of a landlord. When I asked about scaling, his answer was emphatic: "No, no, no, no, no, no."
And yet. He's tying his grand opening to Roger Sharpe's 50th anniversary of "The Shot" — a film screening, a signed Bank Shot game raffle, classic tournaments over three days. He's sketching out a Hall of Champions honoring the people who built the industry and a tech apprenticeship program. The fire door is still being fabricated.
Whether this is the venture where things click is a question the opening months will answer. Francis seems at peace with the uncertainty.
"If you do something really well, it'll make money. But you don't set out to make money."
Opening Day
The Pinball Capital's grand opening celebration is scheduled for April 2–4, 2026, at 3200 W Le Moyne Street in Stone Park, IL. The first night ($100, 150 tickets max) features a screening of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, a raffle for a Bank Shot machine signed by Roger Sharpe, and free play pinball. April 3rd and 4th ($40 each) feature classic pinball tournaments. A combo ticket for all three days is $150.
The fire door, presumably, will be installed by then.
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