This Casino Game Is Older Than Every Currency You’ve Ever Used

Long before anyone drew numbered balls in a glass tumbler, people in ancient China were betting on characters printed on paper tickets, and the results traveled between cities by pigeon. Keno is not just an old casino game, it is arguably the ancestor of the lottery itself.

Ancient China: a betting game that funded a government

Keno is of Chinese origin and dates back at least 2,000 years, to around the 3rd century BCE. The original name was baige piao, or pai-ko p’iao, meaning white pigeon ticket, a reference to the tickets used in a betting game involving homing pigeons. From roughly this period onward, baige piao games existed in most provinces of China, usually arranged by one or more gambling houses with the permission of the provincial governor, who in turn received a share of the profits.

The original ticket did not use numbers at all. It featured the first 80 characters from Qianziwen, the Book of a Thousand Characters, a classic piece of Chinese literature and education. Players picked characters instead of numbers, which meant the game doubled as a literacy exercise for anyone who played it regularly.

There is a popular legend that an emperor of the Han Dynasty named Cheung Leung invented the game to fund his army during a siege, and that the proceeds helped pay for the construction of the Great Wall of China. It is a compelling story, and it shows up constantly in casino marketing copy, but it is widely treated as legend rather than documented history, so it is worth enjoying as folklore rather than repeating as fact.

From pigeons to pigtails: Keno crosses the Pacific

Chinese immigrants brought the game with them to the western United States in the 1840s, where it became known in the West as pak-a-pu. Because lotteries were illegal in many American jurisdictions at the time while horse racing was not, casino operators simply rebranded the game as Horse Race Keno, replaced the Chinese characters with numbers, reduced the grid, and assigned each number to a horse. Players picked a winning horse instead of a character, and the term keno races is still used today as a hangover from that workaround.

When horse race betting eventually became taxable in the early 1960s, Nevada casinos dropped the horse racing framing entirely and simply called the game Keno, the name that stuck for good.

What that ancient lottery looks like today

Strip away 2,000 years of pigeons, generals and rebranded horse races, and here is that same bet, rendered as a grid on a screen.

Wolfbet’s Keno game, set to Medium risk with three numbers picked

This version uses a 40 number grid instead of the historical 80, but the core mechanic is unchanged: pick numbers, place a bet, see if the draw matches your picks.

The RISK panel on the left, set here to Medium, controls the payout table. Low risk spreads out smaller, more frequent wins, while High risk pushes toward rare but much larger multipliers for the same number of matches. Auto Pick lets the system choose numbers for you if you have no preference, and Clear Table resets your selection.

The row of multipliers along the bottom is where the payout logic lives. Each column corresponds to a number of matches, counted from the left: 0 matches, 1 match, 2 matches, 3 matches, and so on up to however many numbers you picked. In this example, three numbers were picked (11, 20 and 22), so the table only goes up to 3 matches: 0x for zero or one` match, 2.8x for two matches, and 50x for hitting all three. Pick more numbers and the table extends further, with new columns for four matches, five matches, and beyond, each carrying its own multiplier.

Once Bet Amount is set, hitting BET triggers a provably fair draw of 10 numbers out of the 40 on the board. Your payout depends entirely on how many of your picks land among those 10 drawn numbers, read straight off the multiplier row you already saw before you even placed the bet.

Play Keno at Wolfbet now.