Keno: The Game Through History

Keno started off as a game that was devised out of sheer necessity. History tells us that the earliest recorded account of the game dates back to the Han dynasty, 200 B.C. during the reign of Cheung Leung. His city was facing invader attacks and his army was needing more supplies to keep them from fighting the invading forces. The city's people, however, were not very happy about the prospect of paying more taxes to keep the war going and were adamantly telling the ruler their sentiments.

Therefore Cheung Leung had to find other means to make money for his troops and his eye fell on the ancient Chinese poem called the Thousand Character classic.

This poem, written by noted Chinese poet Zhou Xingsi, was composed of a thousand characters, none of which were repeated even once in the poem's entirety. It was arranged in two hundred and fifty phrases, with each phrase composed of four characters.

It was a popular teaching tool used to help Chinese youngsters learn how to read and count, and the game is still played by modern Chinese even up today, with the slight modification of the 120 characters now reduced to eighty.

Taking one hundred and twenty characters from the poem, Cheung Leung created subdivisions of eight and it was these subdivisions that players had to guess correctly to receive a reward, which was usually ten taels, the currency at that time.

The Chinese called it the game of the white pigeon, since white doves were used to fly from place to place to carrying announcements of winning combinations and winners' names.

Soon money to fund the war poured in, and even more came that was used to construct Great Wall of China, one of the most popular monuments of Chinese ingenuity known to man today.

The game was brought to America by Chinese immigrants, sailors, and railroad workers who were there to build the railroads. It became especially known in the San Francisco underground as the Chinese lottery, although initially few Americans were able to play the game because it used traditional Chinese characters. In the early 20th century the Chinese characters were replaced by more American-friendly numbers, to entice more American players into playing the game.

When Nevada decided to legalize gambling in the 1930s they did not include keno, which clearly was a form of gambling. To solve this little problem operators changed its name to Horse race Keno, since horse-racing was already a legal form of gambling. Finally, after a short wait off-track betting was finally allowed by the government, and operators decided to change the name of the game back to keno, and it has stayed that way since then.