West Virginia Has Five Casinos. One Makes More Than the Other Four Combined, and One Needs a Room Key to Enter.
Hollywood Casino at Charles Town won $325 million from slots and tables last fiscal year, more than West Virginia's other four casinos together. At the other end of the state, the Greenbrier's casino admits only hotel guests and members, requires a jacket after 7pm, and in August 2026 came within a day of closing.
Published 2026-11-02.
Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races won $325 million from slot machines and tables in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2026. West Virginia's other four casinos won about $254 million between them. One casino, an hour from Washington, is more than half the state's gaming business, and most of the people on its floor are not West Virginians.The other four could not be more different from it or from each other: a thoroughbred resort and a greyhound track in the Northern Panhandle an hour from Pittsburgh, a smoke-free greyhound casino outside Charleston, and a casino inside The Greenbrier resort that you cannot enter without a room key, a club membership or a convention badge.
Charles Town is the big one: 1,700-plus machines, 63 tables plus poker, a 153-room inn, thoroughbred racing most of the year, and the PENN Play card. Mountaineer (New Cumberland) and Wheeling Island are the Pittsburgh-side racetrack casinos with hotels and smoking floors. Mardi Gras near Charleston is the state's only smoke-free public casino and its second-biggest table pit. The Greenbrier's Casino Club is for resort guests and members only, with a dress code. Online casino play in West Virginia, $439 million last year, is almost as big as every slot floor in the state put together.
Charles Town: the Washington casino that happens to be in West Virginia
Charles Town is 63 miles northwest of Washington and 76 west of Baltimore, at the end of Route 9 from Leesburg, and that is the whole business plan. PENN Entertainment's annual report describes 115,000 square feet of gaming, 1,720 machines, 63 table games not counting poker, a 153-room inn and a three-quarter-mile lighted thoroughbred track with a 3,000-seat grandstand. The Lottery's own count averaged 1,639 terminals in play last year, and they won $263 million; the tables won another $62 million, more than the rest of the state's tables combined.
What the numbers also show is a ceiling. Slot revenue was $259 million in fiscal 2022 and has stayed between $262 million and $274 million every year since, which is what happens when MGM National Harbor opens on the Potomac, Maryland Live! fills the BWI corridor and Virginia starts opening casinos of its own. Charles Town has not shrunk. It has stopped growing, and PENN's response has been to keep it as the regional default for Loudoun and Frederick counties rather than to expand it. Our Maryland guide covers the competition from the other side.
The racing is serious by regional standards: 165 live dates in 2026, 21 stakes worth $3.8 million, with the $1 million Charles Town Classic and $750,000 Charles Town Oaks on August 28 and the West Virginia Breeders' Classics on October 10. The card is PENN Play, which earns and redeems at every Hollywood casino from Perryville to Las Vegas, and at Plainridge Park and The Meadows. Online, DraftKings runs its West Virginia casino and sportsbook under Charles Town's license, and at $101 million in iGaming revenue last year it is the biggest online brand in the state. Jefferson County's clean-air rules exempt gaming floors, so the casino smokes.
Sports betting began here on August 30, 2018, the first legal bet in West Virginia. The retail book's branding has changed with PENN's partners; the online skin is now theScore Bet after PENN wound down ESPN BET at the end of 2025.
Mountaineer and Wheeling Island: Pittsburgh's two
Mountaineer, in New Cumberland at the top of the Northern Panhandle, is an hour from downtown Pittsburgh and half an hour from its airport. Century Casinos has operated it since December 2019 under a lease from VICI Properties, which bought the real estate. Century's own description: a 66,000 square foot casino with 1,045 slot machines and 26 tables, a 357-room hotel, a golf course on 1,528 acres, a sportsbook, and thoroughbred racing from April to December with the Grade 3 West Virginia Derby, worth $400,000, in August.
It is the West Virginia casino whose numbers are going the wrong way: slot revenue fell from $86.5 million in fiscal 2022 to $74.1 million in fiscal 2026, about 14 percent in four years. Century told shareholders in March 2026 that the Mountaineer license comes up for renewal this year and that the company is in a strategic review that may include selling assets; in September it sold two Alberta racetracks, and Mountaineer was not part of that deal. Hancock County banned casino smoking in 2015 and in 2018 amended the rule to let Mountaineer have it back. Caesars and BetRivers run their West Virginia apps under Mountaineer's license. The property's old web domain has lapsed and is listed for sale, which tells you something about the marketing budget.
Wheeling Island has been Delaware North's since 1988, on the island in the Ohio River off I-70 about an hour from Pittsburgh and two from Columbus. It has a 151-room hotel, more than 1,000 slots that won $87 million last year, up from $78.5 million four years ago, blackjack, craps and roulette, a poker room that opens Wednesday through Sunday, free self-parking, and a greyhound track with live racing Wednesday to Sunday at 1pm. The casino smokes in designated areas; Ohio County exempted gaming floors in 2016 and declined to change its mind in 2017.
The greyhounds are the question hanging over both Delaware North tracks. West Virginia law requires live racing to hold the slot license, Wheeling and Mardi Gras are two of the last tracks running in the country, and in April 2026 the US House passed a farm bill with a nationwide ban attached, 224 to 200, after an amendment to exempt West Virginia failed. The Senate's version had no such clause, and as of early November the tracks were still publishing racing calendars through December 31. Delaware North has said it would work with kennel owners to phase racing out if the state decoupled it from the casinos. Bet365 launched as Wheeling Island's first online skin in August 2026, which is a vote of confidence of a kind.
Mardi Gras: Charleston's smoke-free one
Mardi Gras Casino & Resort is in Cross Lanes, Kanawha County, off I-64 about 14 miles west of Charleston, with a 150-room hotel under renovation, 700-plus slots, 35 tables, a poker room, Delaware North's new Ember Sportsbook, and greyhound racing Tuesday to Saturday at 6pm. Its slots won $54.9 million last year, the least of the four tracks; its tables won $13.8 million, second in the state behind Charles Town and well ahead of Mountaineer and Wheeling.
That table number has a cause. Kanawha County has banned indoor smoking since 2008 with no casino exemption, and Mardi Gras's president told the health board in 2024 that it was the only public casino in West Virginia without an indoor smoking area. The casino asked for a sealed 150-machine smoking room; the Kanawha-Charleston Board of Health voted it down 4 to 2 on May 15, 2025, and there has been no reversal. For a Charleston table player the result is the state's one smoke-free pit. For Delaware North it is a floor that lost market share when Sandy's Racing & Gaming opened across the river in Ashland, Kentucky in 2023, by the company's own account to the board. FanDuel moved its West Virginia online casino and sportsbook to Mardi Gras's license in September 2025, which makes the smallest track the home of the second-largest online brand.
The Greenbrier: a dress code, a room key, and a year on the edge
The Casino Club at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs admits registered hotel guests, members of the resort's clubs, and convention attendees when the hotel is busy enough; there is no entrance fee and no walking in off the road. Before 7pm the dress is resort casual. After 7pm it is business casual with jackets required for men and no caps; dark denim is tolerated. The room has about 160 slot machines and 31 tables, including blackjack, roulette, craps and poker, a G-Rewards players club and a sportsbook, and it is non-smoking. Its gaming revenue in fiscal 2026 was about $6.5 million, two percent of Charles Town's.
Its size is not why it mattered in 2026. The resort, owned by the family of Senator Jim Justice, spent the year in a financing crisis that reached the casino directly. The Lottery Commission renewed the casino license at an emergency meeting on June 30, hours before it would have lapsed over a late audit, and put the resort on quarterly financial reviews. On August 13 the Justices' lawyers told a federal court the casino would close the next day with about 90 layoffs unless regulators approved a change of control. On August 14 a $500 million deal with Kennedy Lewis Investment Management closed, giving the investor 51 percent of the holding company and three of five board seats under a chairman who came from MGM Resorts; the Lottery approved the casino license under the new owners on August 26, and tax liens were withdrawn in September. The casino did not close. For a guest, the Greenbrier is still the only West Virginia casino that is a destination in itself, and BetMGM's West Virginia app, which runs under its license, is the only part of it most residents will ever use.
Where the usual advice is wrong
The usual advice is that Charles Town is the only West Virginia casino worth a trip and the rest are for locals. Flip it. Charles Town is a day-trip casino for Northern Virginia and Maryland: a big floor, a 153-room inn and a racetrack, in a small town with not much else to do after the last race. It is excellent at being that. It is not a weekend.
Mountaineer has 357 rooms, a golf course and a thoroughbred meet, and its slot revenue is sliding, which is the condition under which a casino mails its best offers. Wheeling Island has a hotel on an island in the Ohio River with a historic downtown across the bridge. The Greenbrier is one of the great hotels in the country with a small casino under it. Mardi Gras is the only one of the five where a non-smoker can play blackjack indoors without a membership card. Each of those is a better weekend than Charles Town for a specific person, and the only thing the standard advice gets right is that Charles Town is where the money is.
One more number for context. Online casino operators won $439 million from West Virginia players in fiscal 2026; the state's slot floors won $479 million. Within a year or two the phone will be the biggest casino in West Virginia, and the floors will be what they increasingly are already: racetracks with hotels for people from somewhere else. The state list with distances is on West Virginia casinos.
Topics
- west-virginia
- charles-town
- greenbrier
- racinos
- mid-atlantic
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