Keno stands out as one game that is really popular in most online casinos. Before anyone starts playing this game online there is a need to learn about keno odds and strategy, but maybe let us first find more about its history, which does date for long times appearing in China.

The history of Keno is interesting and long. It took many years to eventually develop in what we find in casinos nowadays. One ancient scroll states that keno history started in China around 2000 years ago. The person that invented it was Cheung Leung and his reason was to save his town.

Citizens did not want to fund his war by taxes so he was faced with an army that was running out of supplies. This basically meant that the city was close to losing the war. Cheung decided to create a lottery so that supplies could be bought for his army. By doing this the entire town was basically saved.

Keno started to quickly spread in China as different parlors and casinos were opened. Due to the popularity for the game funds started to be raised and those funds basically helped in building the well known Great Wall in China. We can say that the building was the first ever mark that keno has placed on our world.

In early keno history this game was actually called White Pigeon Game. This is because the gamblers were using pigeons in order to transmit winning scores between different players. The rules that the original game had were very similar to what modern keno shows.

Ancient keno was using different characters and not numbers as we see today. Every single one of the 80 characters appeared as they were taken from “Thousand Character Classic”, one really famous poem, a children’s writing and reading skills book.

Eventually keno history evolved as it reached America thanks to different immigrants that were working the railroads. At start it was an illegal game in casinos as there were many gambling laws that existed at the time. Even so, Chinese immigrants did raise its popularity and this gave it a new game: “Chinese lottery”. This was when the original keno characters were replaced by numbers.

As soon as we saw gambling legalized in the year 1931 lotteries still stood out as illegal in most US casinos. Even so, different establishments wanted the game so owners transformed it under the label of a horse racing game. Plain numbers were not used anymore and they were replaced by horse numbers.

Different features of the time did remain in keno history including a reference to it as racing game. Around that time we also saw the name of keno being given, all coming from the short version of “horse race keno”. As time passed lotteries became legal and horse betting started to be taxed. We thus saw the re-appearance of Keno in an original form.

By the time we reached 1963 we saw that payout limits noticed in Nevada casinos were at around $25,000. By 1979 the amount doubled. By 1989 we were faced with no limits and nowadays different casinos can choose different limits. Keno history did manage to establish itself as being long and since online keno appeared a few years ago in online establishments we can only expect to see even more increases.