CHESTER, W.Va. -- Mountaineer Race Track and Gaming Resort sits like an upscale shopping mall on a lonely stretch of Route 2, as if some drunken contractor had tired of his long journey and built on the first empty spot.

Mountaineer is a destination resort, meaning that the chances that someone who's just passing by might drop that week's Social Security check down a slot machine are negligible. People come here to gamble seriously. In one corner I found an old friend of my father's playing two machines simultaneously: a hand hitting the buttons on each one. They gamble in stereo here.

Pennsylvania wants them to gamble in Pennsylvania and they are not necessarily looking for the blue-haired grandmothers slipping nickels into the noisy little toys in the main parlor. They are looking for people like Jerry Poulos.

"I feel sorry for them," Poulos said, glancing at the old people in the main parlor from his perch in the "high stakes" enclosure, where the machines take $20 bills.

"I've got $3,000 in this machine," he said. "I'll just keep stuffin' it till I spend five grand. Then I'm goin' home."

Home is Youngstown, Ohio. Poulos comes to Mountaineer regularly enough that he gets his meals and room free. He'd prefer to gamble in Pittsburgh because, as will happen in places like this, he is convinced the machines are less generous than the ones in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

He says he has won as much as $88,000, though he had to spend $50,000 to do it. As he spoke he jammed what must have been five house payments into the machine.

Pennsylvania will soon have its own versions of this place and Pittsburgh, which is always in search of simple solutions to complex problems, hopes its racetrack and "gaming resort" -- the gambling industry can never bring itself to call itself that -- will create a new vibrancy.

City fathers would love the tour buses that regularly ply I-70 and Route 2 to places such as Wheeling Downs and Mountaineer. They'd settle for the old folks, but the big action is guys like Jerry Poulos, who made his fortune in the trucking industry and likes nothing better than to move it around into machines that let him feel, on occasion, that he got one over on the house.

"You ever play barbotte?" he asked. It's a dice game, played in teams. The payout is 50-50, which makes it the least ideal table game for a casino. "The best barbotte game in Pittsburgh is in Sewickley," Poulos said. Needless to say, the state gaming commission has not sanctioned it.

The criticism of slot machines, which are also credited with saving West Virginia's horse racing industry by drawing new marks to the casinos and the adjacent tracks, is that they drain money from people who could better spend it on things like washers, dryers, cars, groceries, mortgages and medicine.

"A lot of people get hurt here, my friend," Poulos said. He told of a banker pal who took all of two years to extinguish his pension savings.

At the same time, Hancock County's economy wasn't exactly building new pensions at the time MTR Gaming Group turned 342 racetrack jobs into 1,700 casino positions.

There have been spinoffs, insists Tamara Pettit, director of public relations for Mountaineer. Agribusiness in the area has flourished as horse breeders move in, and surrounding businesses are growing.

"A few miles up the road, a Holiday Inn Express is being built. I would say that is primarily because of Mountaineer. Obviously restaurants. Your gas stations, small businesses, that type of thing," she said. One type of thing she did not mention was the corrugated building a short stretch up the road. It is painted pink and offers exotic dancers and a naked bartender. A second is going up a quarter-mile away.

With an eye toward Pennsylvania's expansion into slots, West Virginia's legislature goes back into session Wednesday with a bill on the table to expand into table games: dice, blackjack, roulette. The gambling wars will pick up. Jerry Poulos says he'll see us Downtown sometime soon. It's convenient to Sewickley, home of the best barbotte game in town.