The Gambling Game of Keno

Keno is a gambling game that many of today’s casinos, both online and live, make available for players of all ages and levels of experience with real money games to enjoy, and it resembles a lottery. It is also offered as a method of participating for some established lotteries.

Players place their bets by selecting numbers from one through to 80, although there are sometimes more available, sometimes less, 80 is the most common amount of numbers provided. After bets have been placed on which numbers the player feels are most likely to be revealed when they are randomly drawn, twenty will be made known, selected completely arbitrarily by a random number generator or RNG.

The Prizes Available for Keno

Online casinos’ rewards for the correct guesses players make as to which keno numbers will end up being selected will vary from each to each, set out in what is known as a paytable. The player will be paid out according to how many numbers he or she selected, either on their own or by means of a terminal doing so automatically for them; the number of these that ended up being correct; and the amount of the wager which was placed on them.

The keno paytable at Casino A will vary considerably from that available for Casino B, and these usually carry a larger house-edge than the other real money games on offer from the casino. This ranges from as little as 4% to as much as 35%, and, as this fact has an obvious impact as to how much the player ends up able to win, it is highly recommended that this information be confirmed by the player before the game commences.

The History of the Game

Although the word “keno” has both Latin and French roots, meaning “five each” in the first, and “five winning numbers” in the second, it is actually thought to have started off in China. In fact, it is believed to have helped rescue one of this country’s cities during a war, when its popularity helped generate enough money to fund the building of what would become the Great Wall of China. In modern-day China the concept of making use of money collected in this manner was not established until the later years of the 19th century. There is no documented Chinese Lottery activity before 1847, the year in which the Macao government of Portugal granted a licence for lottery operations.

Chinese players took part in keno games by means of sheets featuring various Chinese characters printed on them, most usually the initial 80 characters of the Thousand Character Classic, and the winning characters were those selected from this pool. Keno’s introduction to the West is thanks to the massive migration of workers from China across the Pacific Ocean for work in building the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States of America during the 19th century. By the year 1886 it had reached extraordinary levels of popularity in Houston, Texas under the name it has since become known by.