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Royal sponsorship of the Royal Oak Lottery, a game more akin to roulette than to a modern lottery, led to the emergence of lotteries as a specific legal category of gaming under at least partial protection of the state. The Royal Oak Lottery was the prototypical commercial gaming venture, setting the patterns and precedents that characterized subsequent enterprises. It was an important gaming innovation in two respects, as it introduced the concept of an organized gaming syndicate that operated ‘banks,’ and introduced the Crown as an agency bestowing legitimacy on otherwise shady enterprises. Both developments were critical to the proliferation of commercial gaming in the metropolis, and in different ways complicated efforts to regulate, contain, or proscribe it.