Along with slots, there’s no easier game to play at an online casino than keno.
It’s essentially a small lottery with frequent daily draws, sometimes mere minutes apart. Players choose numbers that hopefully match the drawn numbers. Payoffs vary greatly based on how many numbers match and the total amount wagered on each draw.
Anyone who likes to play the big lotteries will love keno. You may not win a million-dollar jackpot, but you can still make a nice score relative to your investment.
People who play government-run lotteries and keno will likely say they won more through keno. And you’ll never have to wait until the weekend for the draw. Best of all, nobody ever had to put on their thinking cap or bring their A-game to play keno.
Origins
The story behind keno is fascinating and extensive. More than 2,000 years ago, keno originated in China under a different name. It was called “baige piao,” which refers to tickets in a betting game that involved homing pigeons.
As bettors played keno throughout China, government officials took a cut to look the other way. For centuries, the game involved filling out a ticket with the first 80 characters of the 1,000 Chinese ideograms identified in The Book of a Thousand Characters.
Chinese immigrants brought baige piao to the United States in the 1840s. Numbers replaced characters in the game’s early 20th-century iteration, known as the Chinese lottery. Eventually, the name keno — a variation of the French word quine, meaning group of five — took hold.
Baige piao also was the inspiration for bingo and modern lotteries. Keno is popular in casinos worldwide, and it’s perfect for online play.
How to play Keno
Playing keno is as simple as choosing a set of numbers between 1 and…