High stakes, high class?

Smoky, crowded and intimidating have a place - just not here. This is the motto of the Greenbrier Casino Club, one of two West Virginia casinos that, under the watchful eye of the West Virginia Lottery Commission, began spreading live poker earlier this month.

Now, I'm a poker player from Philadelphia who learned the game in Atlantic City's smoky, crowded and intimidating card rooms long before Jennifer Tilly appeared on Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown, and even though I quit smoking, I'm set in my churlish, misanthropic ways. A "nice" card room? Sounds pleasant, but unnatural, like Catholicism without guilt.

Still, for a member of Washington's huge, underserved poker community exiled to penny-ante home games and sketchy underground card clubs, Texas Hold 'Em in a neighboring state sounds like paradise.

Greenbrier games

But West Virginia coal magnate Jim Justice has brought honest-to-goodness table games to the Greenbrier, a 232-year-old resort nestled in White Sulphur Springs, just over the Virginia border. Might this magic mountain have a card room to rival the Borgata or the Bellagio? I booked a $350 room and made the four-plus-hour, 250-mile drive west to find out.

The first problem was parking. "Valet" isn't a four-letter word, but when free self-parking is available within a one- or two-day walk from his final destination, a cheap poker player dare not speak it, lest a uniformed gent who depends on tips to survive appear with high hopes and an expectant look. My search for self-parking on the narrow lanes of Greenbrier's lush 6,500-acre property did include near-collisions with two small children and three large horses, but it did not end in success. I slunk back to the valet, resigned to the inevitability of gratuity.

An hour later, I left my well-appointed room and its complementary holiday ornament and, on the way to the casino, stopped in the upper lobby for the Greenbrier's daily complementary afternoon tea. I prefer gambling to tea parties, but there was no way not to be charmed by this olde-time, Southern-flavored ritual. I sipped a cup, ate a pistachio-flavored cookie, watched a high-stakes checkers game and felt like Mark Twain without the handlebar mustache and white suit.

I was, however, wearing a jacket. By Greenbrier diktat that sacrifices business to keep out the local riffraff, one must be both a guest at the expensive hotel and, after 7 p.m., appropriately dressed to gamble.

I made my way down the hotel's sweeping staircases to the basement, where, not far from a decommissioned Cold War-era bunker designed to house the entire United States Congress in the event of a nuclear attack, Justice has built a modest casino with 320 slots, a dozen table games and, for your correspondent who could have made a shorter drive to spend his weekend in Atlantic City, a "poker room": two poker tables that didn't open until 7 p.m., manned by one dealer. The second table was, it seems, only for show.

Pitiful poker

"They're not really sure poker is going to take off," the lone dealer said when questioned about the Greenbrier's meager poker zone. (Self-fulfilling prophecy, anyone?) He added that there hadn't been enough interest to get a game going since the casino's opening night, a star-studded affair on July 2 featuring Shaquille O'Neill and Barbara Eden, among other celebrities.

With Shaq and Jeannie long gone, I wandered around the Greenbrier killing time until a game got going. I ate tempura and steamed bok choy at In-Fusion, a serviceable pan-Asian restaurant staffed with talkative student workers imported from China's Guangdong province who were less than thrilled to be spending their summer in wild, wonderful West Virginia. I played Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4" on one of the many pianos that litter the hotel like abandoned newspapers. I watched a preview of Prince of Persia starring Jake Gyllenhaal loop on my room's flat screen. (next page »)