Online Keno Overview
Keno is a lottery game in which a clear dome full of balls with numbers on them shuffles the balls with air currents. Each ball has a number on it from 1 to 80. To “draw” a ball, the person doing the drawing pushes a bar to lift one random ball into a tube. Twenty balls are drawn, and a computer calculates wagers.
Before balls are drawn, players mark an x over numbered boxes on a keno ticket with boxes numbered 1 to 80. After players make their wagers, casino draws 20 random balls. Every casino has its own keno pay tables. Players are paid depending on how many numbers drawn the same as numbers are selected on the ticket. Pay tables are used to determine how much a player wins for each correct pick. High roller online casino usually has many pay tables and many types of keno bets. House edges range from about 4% to about 66%.
Keno was first played by the Chinese, using sheets printed with 80 characters from which winning characters were selected. Payouts depend on how many numbers a player chooses, and how many of them are the same as the numbers drawn. Usually, the more numbers a player correctly chooses, the greater the payout, although there are pay tables based on matching less than a certain number of numbers. For example, casinos may pay out if a person picks 0 out of 20 spots correctly. Most casinos allow bets of between 1 and 20 numbers, though the rules vary from casino to casino.
The probability of a player hitting all 20 numbers for a 20 spot ticket is infinitesimally small. The probability of hitting 0 out of 20 numbers is pretty small, but not unheard-of. On a 20 spot ticket, players have the best chances of hitting 2 (5%), 3 (12.5%), 4 (20.5%), 5 (23%), 6 (19%), 7 (11%), or 8 (5%) numbers.
In many casinos, players can play “in bulk” by playing multiple game keno. This involves filling out one keno ticket to be used for a specified number of games (all of which are sequential), and the number of races you can play with online casino australia one keno ticket can be quite high. After the sequence of games is over, the player is given a certain window of time in which to claim any winnings.
Keno displays are found throughout traditional casinos, and sometimes the numbers appear on the TV sets in hotel rooms. Players can check draw results online too. Most casinos have a “late pay” window for players who cannot or don’t want to take their ticket to a booth immediately after the race results. Tickets played for more than 21 games often grant one year to collect any winnings. With fewer games, the time in which a player can claim winnings varies widely from one casino online to the next. The pay scales and rules must be posted clearly in any keno playing venue.
The advantage of playing keno is that it is very inexpensive, sometimes as low as 1 Euro per game. Playing keno in a casino online has better odds, but the pace is much faster, so it’s possible to lose money online due to the fact that you’re placing a lot of bets. (In fact, many casinos in recent years have cut out their live keno games and replaced them with video keno games.) While some gambling pundits say that you should never play keno because of the high house edge, others say that it’s a very entertaining way to spend a buck or two for the chance to win several thousand Euro as long as you consider that buck or two as a sort of price of entertainment and don’t have illusions that playing keno will make you rich.
People play many – almost innumerable – variations on keno, such as combination keno. With this version, the player circles groups of numbers and specifies how they are to be played. As an example, a player could mark two groups of two spots each and use that ticket to play each of the two two-spots and one four-spot that combines them. Players can bet on whether most of the balls drawn will fall on the top half of the ticket or the bottom half. They can also bet on whether the balls drawn will be unevenly distributed on the left half or right half of the ticket. People bet on odds, evens, and numbers around the edge of the ticket. As many different ways as there are to play bingo, there are even more ways to play keno.
Keno is very much like many state lottery games: you pick numbers and find out if any of them match the numbers drawn, and how much the payout is for the number of matches you have. The difference with keno is that numbers are drawn pretty much around the clock, so there are that many more opportunities to win or lose. And the casino online versions of keno are even faster paced, and the odds are somewhat better than in live keno.