Keno is a type of lottery game that has origins in China and today people play keno on mobile devices and in casinos. It has been speculated that the popularity of the game and the amount of money it raised helped fund the Great Wall of China. Whether or not this actually true is up for debate as the idea of taking money from lottery gains and using them to help fund public works projects did not see use in the country until late in the eighteen hundreds.
It was in the mid eighteen hundreds that records of these games started to be kept. The results of these games were said to be sent from the larger cities and settlements into far flung villages through the use of a carrier bird. Some speculate that this is the reason for the Chinese name of the game which literally translates into white dove ticket.
How to Play Keno
To play the game, players picked a number or character between one and eighty. After players made their bets, a total of twenty numbers were drawn completely at random. The payouts for these bets were based on the operator that was putting on the game. The house edge for these games was significant but also varied from operator to operator.
Sheets of white paper with Chinese characters on them were used for the eighty numbers or characters that could be chosen. Sometimes the characters written would be from the first characters of a book called the Thousand Character Classic.
With immigration so high at the time, it did not take long before the Chinese took this game all over the world. It saw particular popularity in the western United States during the mid to late eighteen hundreds. This was long before players could play keno on mobile devices or on their computer at home.
Keno Odds
When players want to play on mobile like Android keno or on their computer at online casino, it is important for them to know the odds of winning. The way keno pays out is based on several factors. One of these factors is how many numbers that the player picks. The second factor is how many of these numbers are picked by the company or casino running the game. The numbers that the player picks that hit are then taken and multiplied by a part of the player’s initial bet to the paytable’s base rate. Normally, the more numbers that hit from a large amount of picks from the player means there will be a bigger payout for the player. This is true when players play keno on mobile and in casinos. Sometimes a casino will put a cap on the number of numbers that a player can pick at twenty.
The odds of getting different amounts of hits when players play keno on mobile or when they play in a casino varies greatly. For 0 hits the odds are about 1 in 843. For 1 hit the odds are about 1 in 86. For 2 hits the odds are 1 in 20. For 3 hits the odds are about 1 in 8. From 4 hits to 20 hits, the odds vary greatly with the odds for 20 hits being one in 3,535,316,142,212,173,800.