THE FOURTEEN-YEAR POKER GAME – This legendary poker game in all likelihood never really happened but has come to embody the early 20th Century wildness of Thurmond, WV. During America’s coal boom Thurmond attracted the wealthy including mine and railroad tycoons. It became such a hub of gambling, drinking, prostitution and partying that it’s been called the Las Vegas of its era.
The poker game that supposedly lasted for fourteen years was set in Thurmond’s Dun Glen Hotel, also spelled as the Dunglen Hotel. The establishment’s bar and gambling room operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Amounts in some of the individual pots being competed for numbered in the tens of thousands of dollars, which would be equal to hundreds of millions of dollars here in 2026.
Thurmond’s founder, W.D. Thurmond, considered himself a very moral man and he looked down on the antics at the hotels and resorts in the part of town he had lost control over. The McKell Family, boasting looser morals than Thurmond himself, ran their part of the town like it was Dodge City East. Its only Commandment was “Anything goes!”
No drinking was ever allowed in W.D. Thurmond’s territory but booze flowed like water in the McKell’s part of Thurmond.
In that environment the renowned Fourteen-Year Poker Game took place as participants were said to come and go, cashing in and leaving from time to time or being driven away broke. Some gamblers played til exhausted, then had themselves dealt out for a few hours of sleep and fine dining, then returned to the table to repeat the process.
The Dun Glen Hotel burned down on July 22nd, 1930. Thurmond, WV itself was on the decline and eventually became a ghost town as dead as any Gold or Silver Rush town in the old west.
Though the Guinness Book of Records and Ripley’s Believe It or Not recognized the Fourteen-Year Poker Game as the longest ever played it’s on shaky historical ground because no exact details can be nailed down.
In my opinion the Fourteen-Year Poker Game serves as a figure of speech describing the whole Wild & Woolly Thurmond experience just like the Ten-Year Lunch describes the Algonquin Roundtable era in New York City.
Balladeer's Blog 