Keno History

The game of Keno was primitively known as The Chinese Lottery. The Chinese Lottery was actually a instructional aid which was created and based off of a children's rhyme. The intent of this rhyme was to teach kids the characters that they needed to learn to read. This poem is known as "The Thousand Character Classic" and contained one thousand non-repeating rhymes.

The Chinese Lottery developed from this nursery rhyme around 200 B.C., when Cheung Leung, a fabled Chinamen contrived the gambler's game. He utilized the first 120 characters of the Thousand Character Classic to produce a system of rules of betting. Individuals who checked off the right characters would win.

In the 19th century the Chinese lottery found its way to North America as chinese immigrants came to California seaking gold. It did not take long before the lottery caught on in the state and quickly spread to Nevada and into casinos.

Casinos and other gambling institutions nicknamed the game "horse race keno" - they did this to elude criminal prosecution since lotteries were considered illegal at the time and horse racing was not. The operators would organize fictional horse races with each number representing a horse. The objective of the game was to pick winning numbers errrrrrrrrrr horses, which of course did not really exist. The spirt of this racket still exist today as keno is often referred to as the races.

This game was played by writing 80 numbers on pieces of paper and 20 pieces of paper would be drawn for each race game. Today the game is often played using ping pong type balls with numbers on them. The balls are selected from a machine called a bubble.

In the early 1960's the US government started to tax proceeds for horse racing in addition to this horse race keno game. At that time the casinos dropped the horse race part of the name and started to refer to the game as strictly "keno".