Keno: A Short History Lesson

Early accounts about this popular lottery point to the Han Dynasty as the era when it was created. Accounts tell of the game as created by Cheung Leung, an ancient Chinese ruler who was defending the city from foreign attackers. The time came, however, when the people became so tired of the war that they began to refuse paying more taxes to support the city's war time efforts. This was bad news for Cheung Leung. His army was slowly getting smaller, and funds, supplies, and food to feed his men were getting scarce.

He had to devise a plan to give his men the needed supplies to continue fighting, and simultaneously keep the Chinese inhabitants happy by not levying more taxes on them.

Fortunately, Cheung Leung was also some kind of a literary buff. He took his inspiration from the age old Chinese poem titled the Thousand Character Classic, a popular Chinese poem written by equally notable poet Zhou Xingsi. This poem has long been used by the Chinese to teach young children how to count.

It was composed of two hundred and fifty phrases, each containing four phrases. Cheung Leung took one hundred and twenty and divided into subdivisions of eight. All the players had to do was guess the contents of one subdivision and if he succeeded, he was given a reward, which was usually ten taels, the form of currency at that time. The game is still being played by modern Chinese, although the original 120 characters are now reduced to a more manageable 80.

The game was a hit and soon every Chinese was playing it. Because of the lack of faster means of communication, this being the Han dynasty, game operators used white doves to relay messages to far flung areas containing announcements of winning combinations and winning names. Soon everyone was playing the game, and Cheung Leung was able to continue his war with the money that the game generated. Not long after that proceeds from the game were used to help build the Great Wall of China.

Keno was brought to the US by Chinese immigrants, sailors, and railroad workers. IT became a popular underground lottery in San Francisco, where it was called the Chinese lottery. The traditional Chinese characters that the Chinese were used to were replaced by easier-to-understand numbers to attract more players.

It also made a great impression on Nevada gamblers. When the Nevada state legislature decided to allow gambling activities in the 1930s, they did not include keno in the list. This did not worry keno operators though. They simply renamed the game Horse race keno, where each player pretended that the numbers represented horses, since horse racing was already a legal game at that time. Today each keno draw is still called a race.

Finally, the government decided to legalize off-tract betting and operators decided to rename the game keno, which was its original name to begin with, and the name has not been changed again.