Keno is one of the few games that makes it genuinely possible for players to win life-changing sums of money for a relatively tiny outlay, and that fact motivates players to want to try and beat it in whatever legal way they can. One common approach that Keno enthusiasts like to take is to play the game in a deliberate rather than random way, using what are often referred to as Keno Systems and Keno Patterns.
Keno Systems are pre-determined strategies which follow stated rules – simple or otherwise – in an effort to give the player certain guarantees if particular conditions are met. Keno Patterns are methodical methods of playing which involve selecting numbers that correspond with specific patterns, visual or mathematical. Both approaches have their pros and cons, so let us now look at each in turn…
Keno Systems
Although fans of Keno Systems like to talk about guarantees, the vast majority of systems can only offer conditional ones. The only system that is 100% guaranteed to give the player complete success every time he or she plays is one that involves covering every possible combination of numbers. Unfortunately, doing that would cost much more than would be won from the eventual winning entry, so this fool proof system is not viable from a practical point of view.
At the opposite extreme are Keno Systems that are highly practical due to their low cost, but which offer the loosest possible guarantees. For example, if you are playing a game that uses 80 numbers, you could play 8 entries and cover 10 different numbers on each entry. The guarantee of that particular system is that you would catch all of the numbers drawn, but of course there is no guarantee that any of your entries would catch all 10 of the numbers selected.
Whilst Keno Systems are popular when playing the game offline, they are very difficult to use in online games because you can’t usually play multiple entries. The good news is that online players can use Keno Patterns.
Keno Patterns
These are predetermined ways of selecting the numbers that you play in any given round of the game. There are two main types of pattern that can be played, and those can be referred to as geometric and numerical.
When playing geometric patterns, all you have to do is look at the number grid that is used, visualise a geometric pattern that appeals to you and ‘draw’ that pattern by selecting the numbers it covers. For example, on a standard Keno board of 10 columns and 8 rows, you might choose to play the pattern ‘four corners’ and select the numbers 01, 10, 71 and 80. Or you could choose to play the central 4 x 2 rectangle of numbers (8 numbers in total), as visualised horizontally or vertically.
Numerical patterns are sequences of numbers that make sense from a mathematical perspective. For example, you might choose to play the first 10 even numbers (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and so on) or the last 10 odd numbers (79, 77, 75, 73, 71 and so on). Those of you who are familiar with more advanced patterns might choose to play the first 10 prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and so on) or the first few numbers (apart from the first) in the Fibonacci series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on).
There are no guarantees, implied or stated, when using Keno Patterns, as every number has exactly the same chance of being drawn as any other. A pattern selection of 10 numbers is therefore no more likely to win than a completely random selection of 10 numbers, but it is no less likely to win either, and a pattern entry can be a lot more fun to play.
