Definition
A keno or faro bank is a collective term for the apparatus, equipment, and financial stake used by a professional gambler to operate certain games of chance. "Keno" refers to a lottery-style game played with numbered balls or cards, while "faro" refers to a card game once enormously popular in American gambling establishments in which players bet against the house on the order in which cards would be drawn from a dealing box. A "bank" in this context is not a financial institution but the dealer's reserve of money or chips from which winnings are paid and to which losses accrue — the operational capital and physical implements of the gambling enterprise taken together.
The phrase appears most often in criminal statutes and tax laws targeting professional gambling, where legislatures needed precise language to distinguish the tools of a commercial gambling operation from casual or social gaming.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Bank" commonly denotes a financial institution or a stored reserve of something. "Keno" is recognized as a lottery-style gambling game. "Faro" is rarely used in modern common speech and is largely archaic outside historical contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's (1913) defines "faro" as "a game of cards in which all the other players play against the dealer or banker." "Keno" is defined as "a game of chance, played with cards on which numbers are inscribed." "Bank" in gaming contexts is glossed as the funds held by the dealer against which players compete.
The legal gap is narrow but important: in statutory and criminal law, "keno or faro bank" does not describe the game itself or the money alone. It describes the entire professional apparatus — equipment, dealing implements, and operating capital — that constitutes the running of a gambling house. Possession or operation of such a bank was the prohibited act, not merely participation in the game.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Keno Bank: The physical equipment (balls, cage, cards, tickets) and financial reserve used to operate keno as a commercial enterprise.
Faro Bank: The dealing box, layout cloth, cards, case-keeper, and dealer's reserve used to operate a faro game commercially. The faro bank was historically the dominant form of professional gambling in nineteenth-century American saloons and frontier establishments.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely a creature of nineteenth-century American criminal and revenue law and will appear almost nowhere in modern legal sources. Researchers encountering it should expect to find it in:
State criminal codes from roughly 1840–1920 prohibiting the keeping of gambling houses or the possession of gambling implements. Many such statutes enumerated "keno or faro bank" alongside other specific apparatus (roulette wheels, dice tables) because general prohibitions on "gambling devices" were sometimes interpreted narrowly by courts.
Federal and state revenue and licensing statutes. Both faro and keno operations were periodically taxed or licensed, and the defined term anchored who owed the tax or required the license.
The term signals professional, commercial gambling — not social play. Courts distinguished between keeping a keno or faro bank (a prosecutable offense) and merely playing at such a game (often treated less severely or differently under the same statute). Researchers analyzing nineteenth-century gambling prosecutions must be attentive to which side of that line the defendant was alleged to occupy.
Faro declined sharply after the 1890s and was largely extinct as a commercial game by World War I. Keno evolved into modern bingo and state lottery games. Statutes using this language therefore became dead letters in most jurisdictions by the mid-twentieth century, though they may linger unrepealed in older codes. Do not assume a statute containing this phrase was actively enforced at any given date — confirm against contemporary sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is minimal: it identifies a keno or faro bank as "the implement of a professional gambler" and cites a reported case (13 S.W. 108) without further elaboration. The brevity is itself informative — by the time of Bouvier's later editions, the term was sufficiently established in statutory practice that extended definition was deemed unnecessary. Bouvier does not define keno and faro separately in this entry, treating the compound phrase as a unified legal term of art rather than two discrete things. That treatment reflects actual statutory drafting practice of the era, where the phrase appeared as a single enumerated item.
What Bouvier does not address: the distinction between ownership of the bank and operation of it, the relevance of the term to revenue and licensing law alongside criminal law, or the rapid obsolescence of faro as a game. Researchers relying on Bouvier alone will have the definitional floor but will need period statutes and case reporters to understand how courts applied the term in context.
Jurisdictional Note
The specific phrase "keno or faro bank" was most common in American state statutes and is essentially absent from English legal sources, where different gambling terminology prevailed. Application and enforcement varied considerably by state and by period; Western and Southern states where gambling was more openly practiced generated more case law on the term than Northeastern states.