You may not have heard of the ancient game of keno but chances are pretty good that you have unknowingly played a variation of it at least once in your life. That is because among some of the many modern variations are the modern lottery games and various forms of bingo. Everyone knows the popular game of bingo and almost everyone has taken a chance on one form or another on lottery games, they can all trace their heritage back to keno, let us take a look at a brief history of keno in this article.

The ancient gambling game has its origins in ancient China. In its original form it is a game that ws derived from an ancient Chinese fairytale called ‘the thousand character classic’. This poem was originally used as a teaching aid to teach Chinese children the thousand characters that they needed to learn in order to learn Chinese.

Here is where it gets more interesting, a Chinese general actually developed the first form of keno from the first one hundred and twenty of these characters, these characters were than further subdivided into eight character strings per sub division. In order for someone to win the prize they would have to correctly predict the eight character sequence, very similar to modern day lotteries.

Modern Day Keno

The modern day version of keno can be traced to San Francisco at the beginning of the twentieth century when Chinese sailors brought the game with them to the port bars and illicit gambling dens.
The game was quickly adopted by American gamblers who subsequently changed the traditional Chinese characters to numbers so that anyone could follow the game. At that time all gambling in the city was in fact illegal so the game remained an underground favorite for quite a number of years where it steadily grew even more in popularity. A very good place to play online is at the Royal Vegas online casino that offers constant free bonus offers and monthly changing rewards.
Keno found its way to Las Vegas in the early nineteen thirties even though at the time any form of lottery was banned by the federal government. Las Vegas casino owners found a nifty way around this by simply changing the style of keno and renaming it ‘horse race keno’, to this day a keno draw is still called a ‘race’.