In most casinos today Keno is an electronic, computer-fed game. Twenty numbers out of a pool of eighty are zapped with machine-gun rapidity onto huge electronic screens on the sides of the casino.
Keno wasn't always played this way. Up until the 1990s it was a manually operated game, with the eighty numbered ping-pong balls in a transparent fishbowl-shaped container. Two rabbit-ear-shaped transparent tubes stuck out on top, and ten balls were air-blown into each. The whole operation was up front and visible to all the players in the Keno Lounge. No mysterious numbers shooting out of the blue onto electronic wall boards.
It was during the late 70s that I got a bug up my ass to investigate this oddball casino game that offered a $25,000 payoff for a buck investment. At the tail-end of a flying weekend, I had lots of time to spare before my flight home. Plunking myself down in the Sahara's Keno Lounge, mostly as a time-killer, I reached over to the nearest trash can and fished out the cover sheets of the last dozen or so games. (See illustration.)
I tallied all the winning numbers, game-by-game, curious to see if there was any pattern to the drawn numbers. As soon as I finished the tally, I ordered a bottle of beer and examined what I had.
What I saw before me really got my attention. Some Keno numbers repeated regularly, while other numbers never came up at all! Now I was interested. I went back to the trash can and tallied in the four games that were played while I was doing my paperwork, which brought me up-to-date.
Actually I had some advance knowledge of the potential of Keno. Once, years ago, when a friend's son was too young to enter a Las Vegas casino, he sat in the lobby, spending his time keeping track of the Keno board above the hotel registration desk. When his father came by, the son mentioned to him that certain numbers were repeating. The father invested $22.50 in variations of the numbers. Not one came up on the next game. Not discouraged he repeated the bets. The second time around, the 12-year-old won $2,500.
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Before the proliferation of casinos, except for the occasional church "Las Vegas Night," Bingo was the only game in town where you could legally gamble for money. Today, Bingo in the casinos is small potatoes compared to the slot machines and table games, yet years ago in some locales, Bingo was a very lucrative enterprise. Even Steve Wynn had his beginnings running Bingo games in Maryland.
Today, outside of casinos, the game is still a small-time operation, run by church and civic organizations. But not so when "The Boys" decide to put their collective beefy toes inside the church's Bingo Hall door.
Such was the case, according to the May 14, 1998 Catholic News, when the Staten Island, New York Vice Squad stormed into St. Christopher parochial school and arrested five people for book-making. The bookies had already arranged a staggering $16,000 in illegal side bets from just one hundred or so players!
"I'm so glad it happened," the Catholic weekly quoted Monsignor Kenneth A. Gerathy, the pastor of the parochial school. "We've been trying to stop this for some time."
Maybe the Monsignor was glad it happened but, according to Gersh Kuntzman in his following Sunday's column in the New York Post, almost nobody else in the Bingo Hall was.
"Tell the bookies we miss them," said Mary Owens, a regular at the Sunday and Monday games at St. Christopher's. "It's boring without them."
According to the columnist, Ms. Owen's sentiments were echoed by most of the senior citizens at the first post-bust Bingo session. It was, in fact, the parish that had tipped off the cops in the first place—that precipitated the Vice Squad raid at the parochial school.
Why?
The good Fathers had good reasons why. As the New York Post put it, "There was just too much money being made by the bookies, and too little taken in by the church." But all that will be rectified. "The church is now planning to be its own bookie, hoping to accept 'line' bets if the state and city give it a permit."
Bingo is far from the best bang for your buck in the casino, but it can be a relaxing way to pass an occasional lazy afternoon playing the game, so go to it, pal, and I hope you have a bonanza of Bingos.
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