~With Compliments
And appreciation for gaming expert & author Micvhael Shackleford
Eddessa_Knight with Keno Light
Michael Shackleford’s site. You can input various situations, and his calculator will spit out what kind of payback percentage and what kinds of odds you can expect on a keno bet.
How to Play Keno
Keno’s just a game where you guess numbers, just like the lottery. You get a keno card with numbers from 1 to 80. You can choose how many numbers you want to bet on. The more numbers you get right when you bet, the bigger your payoff. Of course, the more numbers you bet, the less likely you are to a see a win. And the odds against you get astronomical pretty quickly.
According to Shackleford’s page about keno, the game isn’t offered by as many casinos as it used to be, which doesn’t surprise me. It always seemed like a game that elderly people would enjoy. My guess is that a lot of the clientele who used to play keno died off. (Sorry if that sounds morbid. That’s not my intention.)
In 2001, Shackleford did a survey of the payback percentages for various keno games in various casinos. The payback percentages ranged from as low as 65% to almost 80%.
This means that the house edge on a keno bet is between 20% and 35%. That’s an astronomical number when you compare it with the 0.5% house edge on a blackjack or video poker bet.
How to Win at Keno
You’ll see various websites hawking information products that tell you how to win at keno. They’re all scams. The people who wrote these websites or these information products might believe what they’ve written, but deluding yourself is just as dishonest as deluding someone else, so I have little respect for people selling “how to win at keno” systems.
If you want to play keno, go for it. But don’t be stupid about it. Understand that it’s a game with a huge negative expectation, and get ready to lose quickly and often because of the high house edge.
All that being said, you’re still way better off playing keno than you are playing any state lottery.
