Play at the Best Real Money Keno Online Casinos

Getting to Know the Game

A typical real money keno game consists of a keno card, a pay table, and a few buttons. While every online keno game is a bit different, these are the common elements you’ll find when you choose to play online.

• Keno Card

  A keno card is essentially a giant grid of numbers. You can think of it as a large lottery ticket with the numbers 1 through 80. In typical online keno games, you’ll find eight rows of 10 numbers each.

• Pay Table

  This shows you what your payout will be for the number of catches you make. In keno, you don’t necessarily get paid out for hitting more numbers. Instead, you get paid out if the percentage of numbers you hit is high. For example, catching 6 of 6 selected numbers might net you a payout of 1800x your bet, but catching 6 of 14 numbers selected might only net you 2x your bet.

• Quick Pick

  Rather than selecting the numbers on your own, you can choose the Quick Pick button to have the system pick them for you. This is much like the quick pick feature found in most state lotteries.

• 1
  Select an online keno game. If you're unsure where to start, check out the various keno games available at the top casinos in our shortlist.
• 2
  Choose your numbers. In most games you can pick between 1 and 20 numbers from the keno grid. How many you choose is completely up to you. But remember, the greater the percentage of numbers you catch, the higher your payout rate will be.
• 3
  Decide how much you want to bet per draw. You can adjust your bet by clicking the arrows next to the selected bet amount.
• 4
  You will then be asked to indicate how many games you'd like to play. As an example, if you choose to bet $1 on your numbers and play a total of 5 games, this will cost $5.
• 5
  Wait for the numbers to be drawn to find out if you are a winner! The system will draw the max amount of numbers, checking off each one with an X or a checkmark. You’ll then get paid out based on how many numbers you’ve hit.

While keno is quite a simple game to understand, it's always worth brushing up on the rules. We suggest you keep the following key elements of the game in mind when you play.

• The keno board has 80 numbers, but you can’t choose all of them. How many numbers you can choose depends on the casino you’re playing at, but the total number is usually between 15 and 20.
• While some casinos will let you play as few as one number, some real money casinos will require you to play at least two numbers.
• If you’re playing real money keno in a land-based casino, you need to wait for a keno game to start before you can see what your payout is. Online, you’re in control of exactly when each game starts.

The payout percentage is what a casino pays out in winnings as a proportion of the money wagered. A 98% payout percentage means that the casino pays out £98 on every £100 made in wagers. The casino's profit comes from the £2 difference.

Note that the 98% is not what you will get back on any individual bet. This is because it's an overall figure for the casino, taken from thousands of players and across many months. As a general rule, though, it's a good idea to choose a casino site offering high keno payouts. Typically a good casino will have an overall keno payout percentage between 95 and 96 percent.

Keno is a game of chance with little possibility of influencing the outcome. You simply sit back, enjoy the show and hope luck is on your side.

That said, you can still employ a general strategy to try to minimize your losses, for example:

Start off by betting the minimum. If you win a game, up your bet. If you lose, decrease it. This isn’t a surefire way to win, but this strategy has led to some impressive results for many real money keno players.

Remember, as with all online casino games at trustworthy casinos, keno online uses an RNG (random number generator) to determine the numbers that will be drawn. This means that nothing you do can influence those numbers.

• Beginning in China

  The first evidence of keno can be traced to ancient China when it was played with 120 Chinese characters. Popular during the Han dynasty, ruled by Cheung Leung, he encouraged residents to play it in order to collect taxes that were used to fund the Han dynasty war. Later on, keno taxes helped to build the Great Wall of China.

• Moving to America

  In the 1800s, many Chinese people made a rush to the western shores of the United States where they sought to work on the railroads. As they settled in San Francisco they introduced Keno to Americans, who found the characters to be confusing. This lead to them being replaced with numbers.

• 20th Century

  A loophole in the legal system allowed gambling, but not lotteries. As keno was a lottery, operators cleverly changed the name to Racehorse Keno and said it was a racing game, thus making it legal. The numbers of the keno card correlated with horses and the drawing was called the ‘race’. Some casinos use this term even today.

• Today

  With the digital age rapidly taking over the world of gambling, keno continues to live on. The best casinos online boast incredible keno games that could very well impress Emperor Cheung Leung himself.