Keno

There are a wide variety of keno paytables depending on the casino, usually with a larger "house edge" than other games, ranging from less than 4 percent[1] to over 35 percent[2] in online play, and 20-40% in in-person casinos.

[3] By way of comparison, the typical house edge for non-slot casino games is under 5%.

quine "five winning numbers", L. quini "five each"), but by all accounts the game originated in China.

Legend has it that Zhang Liang invented the game during the Chu-Han Contention to raise money to defend an ancient city, and its widespread popularity later helped raise funds to build the Great Wall of China.

In modern China, the idea of using lotteries to fund a public institution was not accepted before the late 19th century.

According to some, results of keno games in great cities were sent to outlying villages and hamlets by carrier pigeons, resulting in its Chinese name 白鸽票 báigē piào, with the literal reading "white dove tickets" in Mandarin, but in Southern varieties of Chinese spoken in Guangdong simply meaning "pigeon tickets",[6] and pronounced baak6-gaap3-piu3 in Cantonese (on which the Western spelling 'pak-ah-pu' / 'pakapoo' was based).

[7][8] Eventually, Chinese immigrants introduced keno to the West when they sailed across the Pacific Ocean to work on construction of the First transcontinental railroad in the 19th century,[9] where the name was Westernized into boc hop bu[8] and puck-apu.

[citation needed] Keno payouts are based on how many numbers the player chooses and how many of those numbers are "hit", multiplied by the proportion of the player's original wager to the "base rate" of the paytable.

For example, it is not uncommon to see casinos paying $500 or even $1,000 for a “catch” of 0 out of 20 on a 20 spot ticket with a $5.00 wager.

[10] The probability of a player hitting all 20 numbers on a 20 spot ticket is approximately 1 in 3.5 quintillion (1 in 3,535,316,142,212,174,320).