History of Keno

Keno's history stretched back around 3000years ago. In fact, Keno is one of the oldiest casino games available today.

During the Han Dynasty of China, A ruler by the name of Cheung Leung found his city involved in a long, drawn out war with rival nations. The war exhausted the city's funds and resources. Cheung Leung faces a dilemma because despite his critical financial situation, he can't draw more taxes from his residents. It is at this time when Cheung Leung thought of a way to draw money discreetly from his people.

Cheung Leung conceived a game that is somewhat similar to modern Keno. The game is based on a then-popular poem known as "The Thousand Character Classic". Written by Zhou Xingsi, the poem consists of 250 phrases with 4 characters each, with no character being repeated, thus amounting to 1000 unique characters.

Cheung Leung then used 120 out of the 1000 characters and divided them into subcategories of 8. Players playing the game will have to correctly guess the contents of the subdivision. If the player successfully makes a correct guess, he or she is rewarded with a cash prize. Information regarding whether the player has won or lost is transmitted via messaging pigeons. The game eventually, became so popular that Cheung Leung was able to get enough funds to fund his army, and later fund the construction of the Great Wall of China.

During somewhere around the nineteenth century, drawn by the allure of the North American Gold Rush, the Chinese began immigrating to America, bring along their lottery game. Initially, few Americans play the game because of the chinese characters. Thus, the chinese characters are amended into numbers to adapt to the western society. These lottery games then became very popular, although they must be conducted underground due to laws outlawing lotteries back then.

To evade criminal prosecution, the operators simply nicknamed their game to "Horse Race Keno", capitalizing on the fact that horse races are legal, despite the Keno games having nothing to do with horses. Keno rules also evolved overtime, becoming what we know as the modern Keno.

When the government passed a law to tax other forms of gambling instead of banning them, gambling operators quickly removed the "Horse Race" portion of the name from the game. Thus, Keno now uses the name that so many are familiar with today.