Keno Strategy

The chance of catching at least one marked number climbs with the ticket, but what a table pays for one catch falls just as fast, and on tickets above four or five numbers a single catch is usually not paid at all. The middle column is the result most pay tables start paying at; it falls steadily as the ticket grows.

A one-number ticket is the simplest wager in the casino: it pays on 25.00% of draws and on nothing else, and its fair payout is 4.00x. Whatever the table prints below that figure is the price of the line, and there is nothing else to the ticket. Two and three numbers keep that shape: a result arrives on a third or more of draws, the top line is a few hundred draws away at most, and the biggest payout on the table is a few dozen times the stake.

The key number: Three numbers marked: the full catch lands roughly once per 72.1 draws and at least one of the three in 58.35% of draws, so a hundred draws see the top line about once and some catch most of the time.

The cost of that steadiness is that no line on a small ticket can pay a great deal. The whole table has to fit inside the few results a small ticket can produce, so the player who wants a chance at a large multiple has to mark more numbers and accept everything that comes with it.

A ten-number ticket catches at least one number in 95.42% of draws, yet most tables pay nothing until the fifth catch, so most draws return nothing. In exchange the table carries lines that a small ticket cannot: eight catches come once in 7,384 draws, nine once in 163,381, and all ten once in 8,911,711. Those are the lines that let a game print payouts in the thousands.

The arithmetic of worth is unforgiving about them. A single 1x on the ten-of-ten line is worth 0.000011% of the stake, so a line paying ten thousand times the stake there returns about a tenth of one per cent. Nearly all of a ten-pick table's value sits in its middle lines, five to seven catches, and a reader comparing two games should look there first and at the top line last.

Every row assumes 20 numbers drawn from a board of 80. The last column is the next line down, which on most tables is the one a session can realistically reach: eight of ten arrives roughly 7,384 draws apart, ten of ten 8,911,711.

Whichever size is marked, the price of the ticket is the pay table's and nothing else. Marking more numbers neither raises nor lowers what the game keeps; it only redistributes the same return across more results, some rarer and larger, some commoner and smaller. Two tickets of different sizes on the same game can sit at different prices, but that is because the game printed different tables for them, which the odds page shows how to check.

The rule: Pick the ticket size for the shape of session wanted, frequent small results or rare large ones, and compare games by their pay tables, never by how many numbers they let you mark.

Playing several tickets at once, or the same numbers across many draws, changes nothing either. Each draw is priced on its own, and a dozen tickets pay the table's price a dozen times.