Online Keno is not completely dissimilar to a type of lottery or even bingo as you need to pick your numbers and then hope they come up when the game begins.
How Keno works: Think of it like a lottery ticket and you will understand how it works better. There are 80 numbers on the board. Choose between one and fifteen of these numbers. The amount of numbers you can choose will vary depending on the localized rules of the site you are using. In Keno your numbers are known as spots. Once you have chosen your spots / numbers and the game begins then the casino will randomly pick 20 of the 80 possible numbers. You win more money according to how many of your numbers come up.
Each casino will provide a chart showing how much you win for how many numbers. If you choose 3 numbers and they all come up you will win, but if you chose eight and all eight come up then you will win a lot more as the odds of that happening are so much higher. You do not need all your numbers to come up to get a return. It is like the lottery, payments start when just a few of your numbers come up.
Apart from choosing your numbers, the only other decision to make is the size of your stake for each game or ‘race’ as it is often called in keno. You get paid your winnings in relation to your stake.
Keno odds and strategy: You can always work out your true odds in Keno, but remember the casino will not pay out at those true odds because there is always the casino’s margin to consider. If you choose just one number then your odds are 3/1 of it coming up. This is because 20 numbers are picked out of 80, 25 percent of the numbers, hence 3/1.
Regular keno players often choose around six to eight numbers. If some come up you get a fair payout and if they all come up you get a large sum. If you choose eight numbers you are 11/1 to get four of them and over 200,000/1 to get all eight up.
Keno history: The Chinese were playing keno over three thousand years ago with 80 characters rather than numbers. They then introduced it to America in the railway building boom when Chinese workers migrated to the USA to provide the cheap, hard manual labour that was required. Keno soon developed into a game popular in the USA casinos, with little change to the rules employed three millennia earlier. Now it has migrated online, where games can be played with far less delay than in a concrete casino.
Now you know how to play keno, take a look at the list of the USA online casinos on the right-hand side of this page to choose a good casino that offers keno and accepts Americans.