General Information About Keno
Getting the correct number combination in Keno may be insanely difficult but when you get it just right you might just win the biggest jackpot ever.
The goal of the game of Keno is to between 1 and 20 numbers on a card with 80 possible numbers match up 20 different numbers drawn by the house. The more cards that match and the higher the initial wager, the bigger your win will be.
Bad Reputation
One of the main reasons perhaps that Keno does not have the same following and name recognition as blackjack, roulette or craps is the fact that government gambling regulation in terms of house limits and house edges does not extend to keno and this has allowed many casinos to up the pay scales and create different pay tables that are extremely advantageous to them.
In fact, there are some keno games where the house edge can be as high as 66%, which when compared to the average house edge of around 2.5% on other non-slot casino games is something that is extremely obscene.
However, at the same time, what you will find is that most offline casinos will offer many different pay tables and allow you as a customer to choose the one that you want to play on. This means that you can effectively choose the house edge for the game that you play and therefore if you are knowledgeable enough about the mathematics of the game you can keep the house edge as low as possible.
For example, there are some offline casinos that have keno games with house edges as low as 4% and therefore some of the bad reputation of the keno game is unfairly received.
Online Reputation
The interesting thing about Keno as it relates to online casinos is that the reputation issue is taken to the next level of extreme. Whereas some offline gambling institutions will take advantage of people in order to try and offer ridiculous bets like the 66% house edge bet mentioned above, there are also casinos that try to balance that out and get the reputation of the game back to neutral by offering extremely reasonable house edge percentages like 4%.
This is pronounced to a degree that is almost ridiculous in the online casino world. In casinos that have software packages that they created themselves, they have a lot of flexibility over their Keno games and many of them will actually go ahead and try to offer bets that are classical “sucker bets” in which the player has absolutely no chance of winning anything at any time.
However, there are also other online casinos such as Microgaming casinos that will offer very fun and reasonable Keno games in order to balance this out and when that is considered in the big picture you can see how shopping around and finding an online casino with a very good mathematical house edge is crucial if you happen to be a person that plans on playing a lot of Keno.