Keno

Pick your lucky numbers, watch 20 get drawn, and cash in on the matches. Lottery-style casino keno.

Keno descends from a Chinese lottery and reached the United States with railway workers in the nineteenth century, which is why the older name was Chinese lottery and the numbers were once drawn from a wooden barrel.

It carries the worst odds of any common casino game — house edges typically run from 20 to 35 percent, against roulette's 2.7 and blackjack's 0.5. The reason it survives is the ceiling: matching ten of ten pays enormously, and the appeal of a very large prize at very long odds is a documented and reliable feature of how people weigh probability.