BY TOM SOMACH

Tiny and conservative New Hampshire doesn’t have any casinos or legal card rooms, so recreational poker players there have had to make do.

Find a home game, play online or make the long trek to the Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun casinos in Connecticut–those have been the choices.

But now, the times they are a-changing.

Two new commercial poker halls are to soon open in the Granite State, according to the Union Leader, a New Hampshire newspaper.

Jim Rafferty, president of New Hampshire Charitable Gaming, received permission from the Milford, N.H. Planning Board last week to convert a vacant storefront in the Granite Town Plaza in Milford into a poker hall, the newspaper reported.

Rafferty, a licensed primary game operator through the New Hampshire Pari-Mutuel Commission, plans to convert the former Violette’s IGA grocery store into a charitable gaming facility called the River Card Room, it reported.

Under the state’s gambling laws, poker and bingo halls can be licensed if at least 35% of the take goes to charity and a representative of the charity is present throughout the game night.

Each charity is entitled to 10 gambling days each year, so in order to keep the cards shuffling at a place like the proposed River Card Room, the organizer must line up a series of charities that will accept the proceeds from the card games.

The River Card Room is to have 25 10-seat tables for Texas hold’em and will sell food and alcoholic beverages, the Union Leader reported.

Earlier this month, Rafferty received permission to establish regular Texas hold’em games at the Big Bear Lodge in Brookline, N.H., where previously, bingo had been played.

That caused consternation for Brookline’s uptight police chief, Thomas Goulden.

He’s not afraid of poker, however, but of booze.

“You have a different clientele with poker than you do with bingo,” Goulden told the newspaper. “With poker, it’s more likely that people, especially those in their late teens and early 20s, will be sitting down to games with adults who are consuming alcohol.”

That could lead to underage drinking and then all kinds of problems, Goulden said.

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.com.)