How to Place Keno Bets

Placing bets in some games can be confusing to the newcomer. This article explains why placing Keno bets is so much easier.

Keno Bets – How to Place Keno Bets

With many kinds of gambling there is a skill to placing bets wisely that players need to learn. Knowing the amount to bet under different conditions, or even just knowing when to bet, is important in some games. Keno players, however, are not separated into “one’s who know how to bet” and players who “don’t know what they’re doing.” One of the nice things about Keno, and which makes it more of an egalitarian game, is that there is nothing special to know about placing Keno bets.

Get It Right the First Time, That’s the Main Thing

In Keno, bets are placed only once, before the game begins. It’s only after betting has been closed that the numbers start being drawn in Keno. Once the drawing starts, no new Keno bets can be placed; the game is said to be “closed”. The balls come out (or, in the case of an electronic game, the RNG – the Random Number Generator – spits the numbers out,) and they are posted on the Keno board.

Finally, the drawing is done. and all 20 numbers from the pool of 80 have been selected and posted. The numbers are then available to be matched against the player’s card. Each match is a “hit” (or in some games, also called a “catch”,) and a number that the player picked but which was not drawn on the board is a “miss.”

The player’s card is traditionally printed with the same general layout and appearance as the Keno board. It is marked by putting “spots” on the numbers that the player has picked to go with his Keno bets. For this reason the player’s picks are called “spots,” and the quantity of numbers being played are referred to in this way: a bet of two numbers is called a “2-spot card,” and a game in which the player chose to bet on hitting ten numbers is called a “10-spot card,” (or sometimes a “10-spot bet.”) At the end of the game, the visual pattern, or shape, of the numbers on the Keno board is easy to match against the spots on the player’s card.

There will usually be some hits and some misses. The more hits the player made, in comparison to the number of spots played, controls the amount of the Keno payout that the player receives. Having a complete set of misses in a bricks and mortar Keno games , especially on the classic 20-spot card, also has a payout associated with it, but when you play Keno online, where the maximum bet is typically on 10- or 15-spots, most games won’t pay. (According to Keno odds, though, the casino probably should, because it is less likely to have a perfect miss on a 10-spot card than to have 5 hits.) In every case, though, all Keno bets are placed before the game, the draw occurs, and then the winners are payed. Bets don’t get changed, there’s no second round, or raises, or anything else. Much simpler.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

There are some betting options that are not available over the Internet, only in bricks and mortar casinos. Some of these options have to do with playing the same spots across multiple games, like a “day ticket” that will play numbers for all Keno draws in the casino that day. Others have to do with the shape of the spots as they appear on the player’s card, like playing all the numbers appearing on the outside edges of the Keno board, or the numbers forming a box around a certain number.