Category Archives: Casino Games

Keno is a lottery-like game whose variants can be played at a casino and are sometimes also offered as lotteries. The game originates from China even though the name itself originates from the Latin and French languages. According to folklore about the origins of the game, it saved a city in ancient China from plummeting into war and helped build the Great Wall of China from its winnings.

In Keno, players choose from the numbers 1 to 80 in most cases. A player picks 20 numbers and hopes to match at least 5 numbers to a list of numbers generated randomly. The house edge on the game is large and sometimes goes up to 35%.

The probability that a player will match all 20 numbers is incredibky unlikely to the point of being almost, and essentially, impossible. For a player to get all 20 numbers they would have to beat odds of a mind boggling 3.5 quintillion –  (exactly 3,535,316,142,212,174,320 – 1).

Winning does not depend on any kind of strategy but simply luck when the random numbers come up. This is part of the fun since the big winners know that it has nothing to do with what strategy they used to pick their numbers and was simply good fortune. The chance of winning does, however, increase with more picks.

Pai Gow is a game played with tiles that is very famous in China. The games premise concerns the players scoring the most in a set of two tiles. The game begins by shuffling the tiles and every player receiving 8 face down tiles, commonly referred to as the woodpile.

Each hand can score a maximum of 9 after which the 10 in every score is dropped so that 16 becomes 6. There are ways in which players can score more than 9 using Day (double-one) and Teen (double-six) tiles. A combination of these two tiles has a score of 10. Matching either of these with a 9 gives you a score of 11. These are the only special scoring combinations. Any other combinations adhere to the typical rules of scoring.

Each player forms two hands of two tiles from the four they received including the dealer. The players then compare their hands with that of the dealer. If a player has a front hand and a back hand that are both stronger than the dealer’s, they then win the bet. If only one hand beats the dealer, the hand is considered a push and they get to keep their bet. The game is played by a total of seven players.

Backgammon is a board game with a long history that can be traced some 5,000 years back. The game is played by two players who use 15 checkers which move through 24 points or triangles. 2 dice are used to determine how the checkers move. The game is won by the player who is able to move all their 15 checkers off the table.

The game starts with the players each rolling a die and the one with the highest value moving their checkers according to the two dice. Movement of checkers requires the players to move two checkers according to the numbers on the die such as 6-3 to move two checkers six steps and 3 steps. Checkers should land on empty triangles or one with a similar color of checkers as the player whose turn it is. Checkers cannot be placed on a triangle with two or more of the opposing player’s checkers.

The board is divided into four, with two home boards and two outer boards. The player whose checkers are on the home board may start removing them according to the roll of the dice. If the number is of lower value, then they can remove one checker from the triangle with the most checkers.

The game depends on a little bit of luck as well as strategy. Good players may have a bad game but will keep racking up wins as the game goes on.

Scratch cards are arguably one of the oldest form of lottery style gambling there is. Scratch cards differ by company or casino and are sometimes directly tied to a lottery. Other scratch cards are self contained games with a set number of prizes on offer. These tickets have a waterproof coating that players scratch to reveal whether they have won a prize. The scratch cards are bought from authorized vendors which may range from supermarkets to lottery stands, newspaper stands and casinos.

Tickets can win players an assortment of prizes, including small prizes or large sums of money into the millions. Sometimes, the instant win ticket may reveal your win or loss immediately after scratching and sometimes there might be a game to play, like matching symbols or using a lucky number to combine with a set of other numbers.

Scratch games are purely based on chance rather than any aspects of strategy. The likelihood that you may win the smallest prizes is of course more likely than one of the major prizes (of which there are typically far fewer on offer). Winning the actual jackpot is a very rare event, just as it is with any large scale game of chance.