How to Play
To play Keno, you select a minimum of 4 but no more than 10 numbers between 1 and 80. Each selection is called a 'Spot', so if you select 10 numbers you are playing a 10 Spot game.Keno tickets are located at tables throughout the Casino and in the Casino's Keno lounge. The Casino provides a 'Keno crayon' for this purpose.
Simply mark a blank Keno ticket with the numbers of your selection. Then present your ticket to the Keno desk with your wager and the clerk will give you a duplicate ticket. In a few minutes, twenty numbered Keno balls will be drawn at random from a barrel containing 80 numbered balls, and if enough of your selected numbers are drawn, you are a winner. The results are displayed on screens, called Keno boards, throughout the Casino.
Minimum bets can be as low as 5 cents, although some Casinos only accept bets of $1 or more. The house's Keno brochures give you information about payoffs and various tickets you can play.
The amount of money you win is dependent upon the type of ticket you play and the number of 'spots' caught. You may play as many tickets as you wish. You could win as much as $50,000 on a $1 wager in some Casinos.
The round of a Keno game is called a Keno race. In many Casinos, 'multi-race' Keno is featured, where you can play a number of consecutive Keno races at one time.
Where it's played
Keno is usually played in Casino lounges specifically allocated for the game, but there are so called 'Keno runners' who will collect your ticket and deliver the winnings if the player wants to play from outside the lounge area. There are many television monitors spread all over the Casino halls to keep players informed of the winning numbers.History
Keno is a game that was invented and somewhat similar to the modern keno we play today. The game was based on a popular poem at the time, "The Thousand Character Classic." This poem was, and is today, a popular way for people to lean how to count, using one thousand Chinese symbols, none of them repeating itself. Comprising two hundred and fifty phrases with four characters each, the poem was written by Zhou Xingsi. Out of them 120 were used, subdivided into eight characters to each subdivision. In order to regulate the winning or losing, it was decided that whoever would guess right a whole subdivision would be rewarded ten taels, a Chinese form of currency. Incidentally, this same game is still played today in china, only the number of characters used from the "thousand character classic" has been reduced to eighty.