CHESTER, W.Va -- After years of battling the odds, representatives of the two gaming resorts in West Virginia's Northern Panhandle hope to see their big payoff today with the introduction of table games such as blackjack, craps and roulette.

The West Virginia Lottery Commission yesterday approved Mountaineer Casino, Racetrack & Resort and Wheeling Island Hotel-Casino-Racetrack for ribbon-cuttings at 10 a.m. today.

Ted Arneault, president and chief executive officer of Mountaineer in Chester, said it is a day he and his company "have very eagerly awaited."

For years, West Virginia resorts offered horse racing, off-track betting on dog races and slot machines. Earlier this fall, after legislators approved slots in Pennsylvania, the West Virginia resorts responded with the introduction of poker, the first step in the expansion to table games.

"It's going to broaden our entire potential customer base," Mr. Arneault said. "For the most part, 80 percent of slot players are over 50 years old. Eighty percent of table players are under 50 years old. So you're going to have a broadening of the entire demographic base."

Mountaineer will operate up to 50 tables, and Wheeling Island Hotel-Casino-Racetrack will have as many as 43 tables in use at any time, 24 hours a day.

Two other gaming resorts that had hoped to have table games are lagging behind.

Tri-State Racetrack and Gaming Center in Charleston, W.Va., is still in the process of training dealers.

The other resort, Charles Town Races & Slots in Jefferson County, was left on the sideline when voters defeated a June 9 referendum on the games.

The Mountaineer and Wheeling resorts stretched their gaming-table legs earlier this week with two days of supervised play benefiting local charities.

Players paid $25 to gamble with $500 in play money for three hours at the various tables. The events, which attracted hundreds of people, were supervised by the state lottery commission as part of its assessment of the resorts' readiness.

It also gave the dealers and pit bosses a chance to learn the rules and hone their skills.

Mr. Arneault said Mountaineer brought in a number of Las Vegas and Atlantic City consultants to work with the new dealers, and at least 60 people who left the area to work at resorts in other parts of the country have returned to West Virginia.

"They have the experience," Mr. Arneault said. "They learned their trade and came back. A lot of the supervisors that you see are that way."

Susan Shan, 24, of Robinson, is one of the new craps dealers at Mountaineer. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in creative writing, she decided to become a professional gambler, playing on the Internet and at various casinos.

Her parents, seeing her passion for the games, urged her to consider a career as a dealer.

"The classes for craps, blackjack and roulette for all the dealers who wanted to deal at Mountaineer started about three or four months ago," Miss Shan said.

"For craps, the classes were 10 weeks long. Blackjack and roulette classes were eight weeks long.

"I know how to deal blackjack, but I think I'm just going to be dealing craps because craps dealers are a pretty rare commodity in casinos. It's the hardest game to deal."

But it isn't hard to play the dice game, she said, "once you understand it."

It will take some time, Mr. Arneault said, before the operation is as smooth as it is in the nation's more established gambling meccas.

"Dealers are going to be dealing slower," he said. "And people are going to have to get used to the games. They still have to come and see what we have because they're not used to it in this area. So it's going to take a while, but we think it will build and build."

The charity nights proved that it'll be a learning process. Players had to be reminded of rules such as not handing chips to dealers -- you place them on the table -- and not collecting chips until being told to do so.

Paulette Johns, 63, of Akron, Ohio, took part in the charity event Monday evening. She usually plays slots, she said, but she thought she'd try her hand at roulette.

"I probably won't play much [with real money]," she said. "My husband probably will. My daughter's boyfriend loves craps. But I have no idea what these games are."

Donti Kennedy, 25, a delivery service worker from Youngstown, Ohio, was watching players at the Big Six table, a carnival-type game with a large, vertical spinning wheel. Players place their bets on spots with various odds and watch as the wheel is given a Pat Sajak-like spin.

"Those are good bets," Mr. Kennedy said. "I've played this in Vegas."

Mr. Kennedy said he ventures to Mountaineer a couple of times a week to play the slots and is looking forward to trying the table games. He will be there today, he said, "playing for real money."