A big part of keno’s popularity is its simplicity. It’s very similar to the state lotteries whose drawings you see on TV after the nightly news. Number balls are drawn through a similar vacuum system at a casino’s keno lounge, and there are also entirely electronic versions.
Traditional keno play starts by obtaining a keno card. In casinos, there’s usually a keno booth where these are picked up and submitted. There are also often “keno runners” walking the gaming floor and the casino restaurants – their calls of “Keno! Keno!” are an invitation to have a card filled out for you, and they’ll come back to you with the results.
The basic keno card is made up of 80 numbers, divided into eight rows of ten. Players can usually mark up to 20 numbers that they wish to wager on. At a live casino, the minimum bet is usually $1. The card is either then submitted in person at the keno booth, or taken there by a keno runner. The players can usually watch the drawing live at the lounge, and there are also video screens throughout the property that show the results as they happen.
Where keno gets a bit complicated is in its pay tables. Pay tables simply determine how much money you get back for a winning wager. However, every casino has their own differing pay tables, and some have multiple different pay tables that you can choose from when you wager. Basic terminology for keno is that each ticket has a number of “spots”, each of which is a number that a player has wagered on. Let’s say a player has a “6-spot ticket”, one of the more popular combinations. That means you’ve chosen 6 numbers as potentially being drawn, and let’s say you’ve wagered the minimum of $1 on each, for a total wager of $6. The pay table you are playing likely will require two of those numbers to come in to return your bet of $6. In this particular imaginary pay table, if three numbers come in you get 3 times the total wager amount, or $18. If four of your numbers come in, that’s 6 times the wager, or $36. Five numbers nets you 10 times the wager, or $60. And if you get really lucky and all 6 come in, you get a payday of 15 times the wager, or $90. As with the pay tables, casinos will vary widely in how many numbers you can play and what the maximum bet is.
Of course, as with many casino games, there are various side bets and more complicated variations of play. Betting as described previously is called playing a “straight ticket.” “Split tickets” allow a player to play two sets of numbers in one drawing, but the same numbers cannot be used in each set. “Way bets” allow you to expand to even more sets of numbers on one ticket, up to and including potentially even taking all of the numbers on one line. The “combination ticket” is the most complicated, allowing the player to mix variants of all the previous types on one ticket. You will also often see “multi-race” tickets, which simply allow the player to automatically play the same numbers over multiple games. Casinos will often add little twists and variants beyond these, but these types of tickets are almost universally seen wherever keno is played.
Video keno can be conducted electronically (or over the internet.) The game proceeds in the same manner as live keno, except that everything is done via computer and the results come in much more quickly making games move along faster. Players will also see video versions of keno that are self-contained for only one player, such as the Caveman Keno game commonly seen on Game King machines. The game operates the same way as regular keno, but is contained entirely at that machine with only one player at a time.