I was in New York for a friends wedding up there and while I was hanging out at the bar between all the hustle and bustle of the ceremonial stuff involved for his special day, I got turned onto the most relaxing game I have found to date for myself in gambling. Many people I talk to think Keno is like bingo, while Keno uses bingo balls to draw at most Las Vegas Casino’s, that’s about as similar as Keno is to Bingo. The version of Keno I played at the bar was a New York Lottery drawing, they drew an electronic version of the game every few minutes or so, Very close to the actual amount of time the Vegas Casinos spend on drawing the Bingo balls.

Keno it self is a very easy game to play similar to picking Lottery numbers for the Mega Millions Game or PowerBall, The exception is you can choose up to 20 Balls and the field of balls is from 1-80. I tend to play 2 or 3 numbers at a time, while the pay out for this type of play isn’t the greatest its the slowest drain on your bank roll.

In Keno when you play 2 numbers it is called a 2 Spot, if you play 3 numbers its a 3 spot, and so on. You simply play by using the pencils they have in the Keno Parlor and use it to fill in the number of numbers you would like to play for that drawing. Then you sit back and wait to see if your numbers came in a winner or not, the card you get will have a bar code on it so you can just scan it later or right after the game has finished. The Las Vegas Casino’s offer a wide variety of special bets for different plays but, I wound up at the Monte Carlo on the Las Vegas strip. Over all Keno has the worst odds for the player, Here is a look at the math behind why this is true.

With the 3 Spot card we start having consolation prizes for not matching every pick. First let’s determine the probability of catching all 3 marks. There are combin(80,3) = 82,160 ways to draw 3 numbers out of 80. To catch all three the player must pick all 3 numbers from the casino’s 20 drawn numbers. There are combin(20,3) = 1140 ways to do this. So the probability of catching all 3 is 1140/82160 = 1.39%.

There is a consolation prize for catching 2 out of 3. Imagine the casino puts the 20 drawn numbers in a winning urn and the other 60 numbers in a losing urn. The number of ways to catch 2 out of 3 is the number of ways to draw 2 balls from the 20 in the winning urn, which is combin(20,2) = 190. The number of ways to draw one losing ball out of 60 is obviously 60. So the number of ways to catch 2 out of 3 is the product of the number of ways to pick 2 winning balls from the winning urn and 1 ball from the losing urn, or 190*60 = 11,400. We already know there are combin(80,3) = 82,160 total ways to draw 3 balls out of 80. So the probability of catching 2 out of 3 is 11,400/82,160 = 13.88%.

For any bet the expected return is the dot product over every possible event of the probability and what it pays. The following table shows every possible outcome, with the total in the bottom row.

Catch Formula Combinations Pays Return
3 combin(20,3)*combin(60,0) 1140 $42 $47880
2 combin(20,2)*combin(60,1) 11400 $1 $11400
1 combin(20,1)*combin(60,2) 35400 $0 $0
0 combin(20,0)*combin(60,3) 34220 $0 $0
Total 82160 $ $59280

The bottom right cell shows that over all 82,160 combinations the player will get back $59,280. So the expected return is 59280/82160 = 72.15%. (From http://www.mathproblems.info/gam470/games/keno/prob-keno.html)

Nope! the numbers don’t lie, I can tell you that but, what I can tell you is that If you stick to playing 1$ hands in Keno you can get an awful lot of drinks in for 100 dollars worth of keno play, not to mention all the comp points you will rack up on your players card.  Last time I was in Vegas I could play Keno on 100 dollars for 8-12 hours depending on the night and how many Crown Royals I sucked down and that was leaving a 1 Dollar tip almost every drink. Basically I would earn enough comp points from Keno for a free steak dinner at there “Mid” restaurant.

Keno is a nice break from the traditional table games if you want to cool your jets so to speak so you can recharge. If you stick to your betting strategy and only bet 1-2 dollars a hand you can go a long way on a 100$ playing keno. The key is to stick to 2,3, or even 4 spots these wont make the big hits but they hit more frequently that the others so you can roll it over and continue to play. If you hit a 4 spot almost a 50 dollar winner at most places I will put a dollar or two on the “special” 4 spot or even a 6 spot but don’t go much over these the odds to hit a 20 spot is so ridiculous you pretty much can line tickets end to end though out the whole Milky Way Galaxy before one of them would be a winner those odds are literally out of this world.  But like most games Have fun! you are there for the entertainment value anyways, betting only what you can lose otherwise you shouldn’t probably be there.

Good Luck

G~

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