- Spots
- One to ten, each its own table
- Distribution
- Hypergeometric, no replacement
- House edge
- Set by the prize column
- Number choice
- No effect at fixed odds
A draw of twenty, from a pool of eighty
A keno game is a single draw from a fixed pool, and your ticket either overlaps it or does not. In the form Australians have seen on club and pub screens, and in the form that appears in offshore casino lobbies, the pool is eighty numbers and twenty are drawn each game. You mark between one and ten of the eighty; your marks are called spots, and however many of them turn up among the drawn twenty is your catch. Pool, spots, catch — the rest of keno is consequences. Confirm the pool and draw size in the game's own rules before doing any arithmetic: a minority of variants change them, and everything below moves with them.
The draw is made without replacement: a number cannot come out twice in the same game. That is why keno probabilities are hypergeometric rather than binomial, and the distinction is not pedantry — it is the reason your chances do not scale the way intuition suggests when you add spots. For a ticket of n spots in an eighty-ball, twenty-draw game, the chance of catching exactly k is C(n,k) × C(80−n, 20−k) ÷ C(80,20). The first term counts the ways the draw could pick k of your numbers, the second counts the ways it fills its remaining places from numbers you left alone, and the denominator counts every draw the machine could produce.
That formula is the whole of keno's randomness, and it runs in a spreadsheet with one function. This is what separates keno from a pokie. A pokie's symbol weights and reel strips are not published, so you cannot derive its return and must read whatever figure the help panel states. Keno hands you half the equation outright, because the probability half is determined by rules printed on the screen. Only the prize column is set by whoever built the game, so the only question worth asking about a keno game is what its table pays.
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Each spot count is a different game
Treating keno as one game with one return is the error that makes most keno writing useless. A four-spot ticket and a ten-spot ticket share a draw, a screen and a name, and are otherwise unrelated bets. Each spot count has its own prize row, calibrated on its own, and the hold on one row tells you nothing reliable about the row beneath it. If you read a return figure for a keno game without being told which spot count it describes, you have read nothing.
The trade-off across the rows runs in a consistent direction. Low spot counts resolve often: on a one or two-spot ticket, catching enough to pay is an ordinary event, and the prizes are correspondingly small multiples of the stake. High spot counts are the opposite. Catching all ten is remote enough that the top prize behaves like a lottery line rather than a payout you are playing toward, and the row's real work is done by the middle catches — five, six, seven of ten — which is where the money in that table actually sits. Read those middle rows first on any high-spot ticket. They, not the headline, are the bet you are making.
High-spot tables often also pay something for catching nothing at all, which reads as generosity and is better understood as variance smoothing: it returns a trickle during the long stretches between middle catches. The row worth finding before you commit is the dead zone — the catches that pay nothing. On a high-spot ticket there is usually a band of low-but-not-zero catches that returns zero, and that band is the most likely thing to happen to you.
The decision this produces is narrower than it looks. Pick the spot count by the shape of outcome you want — frequent and small, or rare and large — then check that row's own economics. Never carry a judgement from one row to another.
Working out what a prize row holds
The procedure has five steps, worth doing once properly on the game you intend to play; afterwards you will never need a review site's number again. Find the prize table for your spot count. Note the unit the prizes are quoted in. Compute the probability of each paying catch with the formula above. Multiply each probability by its prize per unit staked. Add the products. The sum is the return per unit for that row; subtract it from one and you have the hold.
Step two is where this goes wrong, and it goes wrong in the direction that flatters the game. Prizes may be quoted as multiples of the stake or as fixed cash amounts at a reference stake, and the two cannot be mixed in one column. Worse, a prize may be stated as an amount won on top of the stake or as a total returned including it. Reading a stake-inclusive table as though it were stake-exclusive inflates the return you calculate. The table's own wording settles it; if the wording is ambiguous, the game's full rules document is where to look, not the tile.
Build in the cross-check. Your probability column must sum to one across every catch from zero to n, including the catches that pay nothing. If it does not, a combination argument is mis-entered, and you will usually find the error in the second term where 20−k is easy to type as 20−n.
One case defeats the procedure, and recognising it is as useful as completing it. Where a prize is pari-mutuel — a pool divided among the tickets that matched, rather than a fixed multiple — step four has no number to use, because the payout depends on how many other people matched too. You can still calculate the probabilities; you cannot calculate the return. The prize column's wording is what tells you which kind of game you are in: a share of a pool, or a multiple.
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The hold is one multiplier; draw speed is the other
The hold on a keno row is not a figure to carry in from anywhere else in the lobby. Keno tables are commonly built the way a lottery line is built — generous at the top, thin across the middle — and that shape is what the procedure above prices. Run it on the row you intend to play and treat the result as the only hold figure that applies. What it will not tell you is how quickly that hold gets charged.
Expected cost is hold multiplied by stake multiplied by the number of draws, and across keno formats the third term varies far more than the first. A venue keno screen runs on a clock: the draw happens when it happens, and the interval between games is a hard ceiling on how fast you can lose. An RNG keno table in an online lobby resolves the instant you press the button, with no clock at all. Identical prize table, identical hold per draw, radically different loss rate per hour. Keno is unusual in that the same game at the same price per bet can be delivered at wildly different speeds, and nothing on the screen flags which one you are sitting at.
This turns into one practical rule that is specific to the format. Decide the number of draws before you start, not an amount of time. A draw count is a bounded commitment you can check against the screen after every game; “a while” is not, and on a game with no clock the difference between those two decisions is the entire difference in what the session costs. Where the interface offers a multi-draw field, set the limit there, because it is the one the game will then hold you to.
Figures differ between builds and lobbies. Read the live game's information panel before you rely on any of them.
Play here →Where keno money goes wrong
Four things cost keno players money for reasons unrelated to the published hold. All four are failures of reading, not of luck.
The jackpot you are not eligible for. The growing top prize on a keno game is normally attached to particular spot counts, and frequently also to a particular stake unit or an enabled extra. Play a qualifying spot count at a non-qualifying unit and you have bought the row without the prize that justified choosing it. The condition lives in the rules, not on the tile, and it is the single most expensive thing to get wrong in this format. Find which spot counts and which unit the progressive attaches to before you pick a row.
Multi-draw read as a discount. Running the same numbers across consecutive draws is a convenience feature: it is that many separate bets, each at full price, each with the same hold. Nothing about repeating a selection reduces the cost of anything. It feels like a package because the interface prices it as one transaction, which also means a mis-set draw count commits money you did not intend to.
Combination and way tickets. Grouping your numbers so that several overlapping tickets are bought from one stake produces a sensation of coverage. Mathematically it is several tickets bought simultaneously, and its return is the weighted average of the rows involved. It changes the distribution of your results, not their expected value, and it makes the ticket much harder to check against a prize table — the real cost.
Chasing the board. Many keno displays show which numbers have come up recently. That history is genuine and has no predictive content, because a draw has no memory of the previous one. A number that has not appeared for many games is not owed an appearance, and the formula above contains no term for how long anything has been waiting.
What is decidable, and the one case where numbers matter
What can be decided in keno is a short list, and what cannot be decided is longer. Start with the proof, because it settles the question people spend the most effort on. The chance of catching exactly k depends on n and k and on nothing else. The formula contains no reference to which numbers you marked. Birthdays, the block from one to ten, a diagonal across the grid and a random scatter are therefore all the same bet, exactly. Under a fixed prize table, number selection is not a strategy.
There is one real exception, and it is the pari-mutuel case from earlier. When a prize is a share of a pool rather than a multiple of the stake, the identity of your numbers stops being irrelevant — not because it changes your chance of winning, which it cannot, but because it changes how many people you would split with. Popular selections concentrate winners. Choosing numbers that most people do not choose increases what you would be paid if you won, while leaving the probability of winning untouched. The effect is small, it requires the prize to be pooled, and in a fixed-odds game it is worth precisely nothing — check the prize wording before spending thought on it.
The decidable list: how many spots to play, which game's prize table to play it on, the stake per draw, the number of draws, and whether a side bet or progressive qualifier is worth its additional cost. Every item can be evaluated with the prize table and the formula before the first draw, and nothing on the list improves after it. That is the honest shape of keno strategy — all of it is selection, none of it is play.
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Two legal categories, one game name
Keno in Australia is not one legal category, and the split matters more here than for any other game on this site. The venue product is licensed and state-regulated: its game rules and prize structures are published as regulatory instruments, amended through the state regulator, and readable in full before you play. Keno also sits outside the class of online services the Commonwealth prohibits, which is why a lawfully licensed online version of a state keno product can exist where none exists for casino games. Which states permit it, through which licensee and on what terms is a question for your own state's regulator or that licensee's rules page; the position is not uniform and it gets amended, so read the current source rather than any summary, this one included.
Keno inside an offshore online casino lobby is a different product wearing the same name. Those operators are not Australian-licensed; online casino services cannot lawfully be provided to people in Australia, and there is no Australian consumer recourse behind them. The structural difference that matters for the arithmetic above is documentary. A state-licensed keno game's rules are a published instrument you can read independently of the operator serving it. An offshore lobby's keno table is whatever the supplying studio built, documented only inside the game's own information panel, and liable to differ between two lobbies showing the same game name.
On availability: if you are looking for the format in an offshore lobby — Safe Casino and WinCrown are the two sponsored here — it is usually filed under a table-games or other-games tab rather than alongside the pokies, which is where most people fail to find it. Whether the format appears at all, and which studio's version it is, is a question for the live lobby's game list on the day rather than for this page.
What this page could not verify
No prize figures, hold percentages, jackpot amounts or draw intervals appear on this page, and their absence is the point. The probability half of keno is fixed by rules and reproduced above as a formula you can run. The prize half is set per game, per studio and per jurisdiction, and a number published here would describe one table in one lobby and misdescribe every other one. The formula travels; a percentage does not.
Several things on this page are shapes rather than facts about a specific game. Whether your game is fixed-odds or pari-mutuel, which spot counts a progressive attaches to, whether a prize is quoted inclusive of stake, and whether a side bet exists at all are read from the rules of the game in front of you on the day. Where a rules document and a tile disagree, the rules document is the one that pays.
Keno's margin is set by the prize column rather than by the draw, which means the game can be priced as dearly as whoever built the table chose to price it, and the only way to know is to add up the row. Set a draw count and a spend before starting, and use the support guide if the decision to stop has started to feel like it belongs to the game. Sponsored links on this site can earn this publisher a commission; that arrangement does not make any operator's keno table better than the one you can calculate yourself.
Questions people actually ask
How does keno work?
You mark a set of numbers — your spots — from a fixed pool, the game draws a subset of that pool, and the count of your spots inside the drawn set is your catch. In the usual eighty-ball form, twenty numbers are drawn and you may mark between one and ten. The prize depends on your spot count and your catch, read off the table for that row.
How many numbers should I pick in keno?
There is no single best answer, because every spot count is a separately calibrated bet. Low counts pay small amounts often; high counts put most of their value in the middle catches and treat the full catch as a lottery line. Choose by the outcome shape you want, then calculate the hold on that specific row rather than assuming it matches the row above.
Does picking the same numbers every draw improve my chances?
No. The probability of catching exactly k depends only on how many spots you marked and how many were drawn — the formula contains nothing about which numbers they were, or what happened last game. Repeating a selection across draws is a convenience feature that buys that many separate bets at full price.
What is keno's house edge?
It is whatever the prize table for your spot count produces, which is why no figure is quoted here. The hold differs between spot counts within the same game and between two games carrying the same name, so a single keno percentage is not a meaningful thing to publish. The procedure on this page lets you calculate the exact figure for the row you intend to play, from the prize column in front of you.
Can you really work out keno odds yourself?
Yes, and keno is nearly unique in that respect. The draw is hypergeometric, so each catch probability is a ratio of combinations you can compute in a spreadsheet. Combine that with the prize column and you have the game's return without relying on anyone's published number. The one exception is a pari-mutuel prize, where the payout is not fixed in advance.
Is online keno legal in Australia?
Keno is unusual in sitting outside the class of online services the Commonwealth prohibits, so a lawfully licensed online version of a state keno product can exist alongside the long-standing venue game, whose rules are published as regulatory instruments. The terms are not uniform across the states, so check your own state's regulator or the licensee's rules page. Keno inside an offshore casino lobby is a separate matter: online casino services cannot lawfully be provided to people in Australia.
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