Wheel of Fortune

Soldiers in ancient Greece invented a game using a shield, which was spun on the top of a spear. They marked sections on the shield and placed bets on where the shield would stop. The Romans played similar games, using spinning chariot wheels. These evolved into the popular fairground wheel of fortune, the forerunner of today's casino game of big six wheel.

The origins of roulette are not well documented. French mathematician Blaise Pascale is often credited with inventing the roulette wheel as a result of his experiments with perpetual motion machines. One theory is that it derived from an old English game called roll it. A game called even-odd, which is played on a spinning wheel, is another contender, however it is most likely that roulette evolved over time from a combination of games.

In 1842, Frenchman Francois and Lois Blanc devised roulette with a single zero. Gaming was illegal in France at that time, but this new version was soon introduced in Hamburg, Germany, where it replaced an earlier version of roulette with two zeros.

When gaming started in Monte Carlo, Francois and his son Camille introduced their version using one zero and a haphazard arrangement of numbers, which became extremely popular in European casinos where it is still played today.

In the early 1800s the two-zero version of roulette arrived in America. It flourished in the saloons in the Old West during the California gold rush and Nevada silver era, when fortunes would be won or lost on the spin of the wheel. In American roulette, the numbers on the wheel are arranged in a more random fashion than is the case in Europe.

The significance of the extra zero is that it gives the house (the casino) a larger advantage, equivalent to twice that on the single-zero European wheel. Modern American casinos play both versions of the game.

Keno

Keno, the casino version of lotto, originated in China nearly 2000 years ago when Cheung Heung devised a lottery as a way of raising funds for his province's army. This proved to be a huge success and even funded the building of the Great Wall of China.

Lotto

Lotteries were brought to America in the 1800s by the thousands of Chinese immigrants who worked in the mines and on the railroads. With the establishment of Las Vegas, the game was quickly adapted for casino play. Originally known as Chinese lottery, casinos throughout the world now operate keno games.