I went on Facebook and found a few poker interest groups. This eight-table room hosts a couple of tables of $1/3 every night (sometimes more on the weekends).Īsheville is 90 minutes west of Blowing Rock. Four-and-a-half hours to the northwest, and a couple of hours north of the Cherokee room, is a private poker club in London, Kentucky. Two hours to the west of Boone is the large Cherokee reservation, home to Harrah’s Cherokee - a full-service casino that houses a beautiful 32-table poker room. None of my wife’s fellow conventioneers seemed even remotely interested in playing poker (at least not with me), so I scanned the area around me for other venues for my favorite hobby. I tried to find a poker game in either Boone or Blowing Rock - to no avail. Blowing Rock is a stretch of hilly North Carolina fields, lakes, forests, and estates - known as the summer mansion of Moses Cone, the “Denim King”, a late 19th Century industrialist. Boone is a college town - home to Appalachian State University (known as App State). My wife and I were going to be in Blowing Rock, North Carolina - about 20 minutes south of Boone. I had done some research on the area before I arrived.

But for me, it proved an opportunity to engage in the world. I accompanied her there, as our travel would involve a Friday night, and we are always together on Friday night.įor many, my trip from Boston, Massachusetts where I live, to this relatively remote region of North Carolina would be an awful exercise in dutiful spouse-ness - trying to stay occupied in a distant place. My wife had a professional conference in the back woods of central North Carolina, near Boone, in a small town called Blowing Rock. How Did I End Up Playing Poker in Appalachia?

My recent trip to and through the south-central part of the United States known as Appalachia is a case in point. The great thing about poker, for me, is that it provides a point of contact with people from otherwise inaccessible worlds. How do we extract the most out of our brief time here on earth? For me, it’s by making connections with other people - by sharing something with them, and letting them share something with me about their lives. This is the latest installment in his ongoing series. He has agreed to publish a few of his chapters here first. note: Ashley is working on a book of his poker travels entitled Poker in 50 States (and 26 countries).

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