At present, Keno is very similar to lottery or bingo since it's a numbers game. The difference with bingo is that in Keno the player selects the numbers for his ticket. The Keno cards have 80 numbers and the player can pick as many as he wants. The selection is made by circling or marking them some other way, and then the player has to take the ticket to the clerk at the Keno booth. The clerk will then give him a receipt with the player's numbers.

After doing that, the player will have to watch the big board which lights up the numbers that have come up, he can also see the numbers on a video monitor. While the numbers come up, the player should mark them down in his ticket. The money gained is determined by the amount of numbers the player guessed (that is the numbers the player picked and came out). The ticket with the winning numbers has to be taken to the keno booth right away if it's an individual game ticket, because the drawing is done every five minutes, so the player has to take it to the booth before the next drawing starts, otherwise the ticket is void and he won't get paid.

In order for the ticket not to get void, the player can get a “multi-race” ticket with the same numbers on anywhere from 2 to 20 tickets. When the maximum number of games matching the number of tickets is over, the player can redeem the winnings and he doesn't have to worry about void tickets. There's another option called “stray and play” ticket, which is a number of games usually bigger than 30. This ticket is good for up to a year after being purchased.

There are Lottery versions of Keno used in many National or State Lotteries around the world. The formulas of the games are different depending on the price structure and whether the game is played daily or weekly, or it might be a fast game with minutes between each draw. The numbers drawn are published on TV for the slow games and on monitors for the fast games' points of sale.