What is the house edge in keno?

It depends on the pay table rather than the game. The draw is fixed and fair; the payouts are the casino's choice. A widely published 8-spot table paying 9, 90, 1,500 and 25,000 costs 27.2948%.

What are the odds of hitting all 8 numbers in keno?

1 in 230,115 when you pick eight and twenty are drawn from eighty. That probability is the same everywhere; only the payout differs.

Is there a strategy for keno?

Only choosing where you play. The numbers you pick make no difference, and the pay table makes all of it.

Keno: The Edge Belongs to the Pay Table

Short version: 20 numbers are drawn from 80 and you are paid on how many of your picks appear. The probabilities are fixed and computable exactly. The payouts are not: they are the casino's choice, so two keno games in the same city can differ by ten percentage points. A widely published 8-spot table paying 9, 90, 1,500 and 25,000 costs 27.2948%.

The draw is fixed, the price is not

Pick eight numbers. These are the chances that a given number of them come up, and they are the same in every casino in the world:

Your hits	Probability	Roughly
4	8.150370%	1 in 12
5	1.830259%	1 in 55
6	0.236671%	1 in 423
7	0.016046%	1 in 6,232
8	0.000435%	1 in 230,115

Hitting all eight is a 1 in 230,115 event. What that is worth to you depends entirely on what the board pays for it, and that is the number that changes from casino to casino while the odds above never do.

Why keno is priced the way it is

At 27.2948% on the table above, keno is roughly ten times the cost of single-zero roulette and fifty times blackjack played correctly. Even Big Six, the most expensive wheel on the floor, is cheaper.

That is not a scandal, it is the trade the game offers: a very small stake against a very large multiple, played at a pace that lets you sit with a drink. It is priced as a lottery because it is one. The useful habit is simply to read the board before playing, since the board is the entire difference between one keno game and another.

What to check on the board

The payout for hitting most of your spots, not all of them. The top prize is where attention goes and almost never where the value is.
Whether the table pays anything for a low number of hits on a large pick, which is where some tables recover a little of their cost.
The maximum aggregate payout, which can cap a large win regardless of what the board advertises.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the house edge in keno?: It depends on the pay table rather than the game. The draw is fixed and fair; the payouts are the casino's choice. A widely published 8-spot table paying 9, 90, 1,500 and 25,000 costs 27.2948%.
What are the odds of hitting all 8 numbers in keno?: 1 in 230,115 when you pick eight and twenty are drawn from eighty. That probability is the same everywhere; only the payout differs.
Is there a strategy for keno?: Only choosing where you play. The numbers you pick make no difference, and the pay table makes all of it.

Every figure on this page is computed by side_games_math.py at build time and checked against the figures the industry publishes before the page is written. Where a number depends on the casino's own pay table, that is said rather than averaged away. Last computed August 2026.