Keno: How It Works, Odds and Payouts

Keno is an instant game. You pick between 1 and 10 numbers from a board of 40, choose a risk level and play. The game draws 10 numbers, and you are paid by how many of your picks are among them.

Coins are virtual and have no cash value. Traditional keno uses 80 numbers and draws 20; Cashout Arcade uses a smaller 40-number board and draws 10. The draw is made on our servers when you tap.

How a round works

1. Pick 1 to 10 numbers from 1 to 40.
2. Choose Low, Medium or High risk.
3. Play. 10 numbers are drawn, without repeats.
4. Your payout depends on the number of hits, according to the pay table for your pick count and risk.

You can only win if enough of your picks match. With no hits you lose the bet, and so do hit counts below the minimum for your risk level.

The chance of each number of hits

The chance of exactly h hits when you pick k numbers follows the hypergeometric rule: choose h of the 10 drawn numbers and k - h of the 30 not drawn, divided by every way to choose k numbers from 40.

Pay tables

The risk level sets the shape of the table: Low pays from a quarter of your picks, Medium from 40% of them and High from half. Pays rise steeply with hits, and the tables are built so each returns 97%.

5 picks (multipliers by hits):

10 picks, the hits that pay:

The full tables for every pick count are in the app on the game's info sheet.

The 50,000x cap and why the middle rows are not larger

At 10 picks, hitting everything is a 1-in-847.7-million event. Priced without a cap, that hit would pay about 137 million times the bet, which the game cannot allow, so no round pays more than 50,000x. Where a hit count would exceed the cap, it is set to 50,000x, and the rest of that table is recalculated so the return is still exactly 97%. A plain cut would have dropped the return of the 10-pick High table to about 66%; recalculating keeps it honest. See the odds page for the shared limits.

A worked example

You pick 5 numbers at Medium risk with a 100-coin bet. You win something when 2 or more match: 27.77% + 7.93% + 0.957% + 0.038% = 36.70% of the time. Two hits return 136 coins, three return 372, four return 2,021, and all five return 26,542. Multiply each payout by its chance and add them and you get about 97 coins on average (the multipliers shown here are rounded down to two decimals). The two-hit row supplies roughly 38 of those 97 coins and the five-hit row only about 10, so the long-shot rows are a small part of the average and most rounds pay little or nothing.

Picks, risk and style

One pick is the simplest: it hits 25% of the time and pays 3.88x at every risk level. Two to five picks give frequent small wins at Low risk. Eight to ten picks at High risk are lottery tickets: most rounds pay nothing. Neither is a better value than another.

How it differs from similar games

Duck Pond: how it plays, odds and payouts and Lightning: how it plays, odds and payouts began as Keno look-alikes (40 ducks or buildings, 10 prizes or strikes) but now have their own rules and pay tables, and Scratch: How It Works, Odds and Payouts is a different random draw altogether. For the maths behind Keno, see Keno Odds Explained: How Many Numbers to Pick.

Tips that hold up

• Number choice is irrelevant. Birthdays, patterns and "cold" numbers do nothing.
• Pick count and risk are the real choice. They set how often you win and how big the wins are, not the long-run return.
• Expect most rounds to pay nothing at high settings. At 10 picks on High, you need 5 hits just to get anything back.
• A near miss is not information. Missing the top row by one number is common; it is the same probability as any other draw.

Play with limits

Because rounds are quick and the big hits are rare, it is easy to keep playing for one more. Set a limit before you start and see Play Safely in Cashout Arcade: Limits and Breaks for tools. Cashout Arcade is for adults aged 18+, uses virtual coins and has no real-money prizes.