Grarrl Keno - How to Play Like a Pro

Grarrl Keno is a game most people play only for the avatar and then forget about, which is a shame really as this game is one of the oldest left in Neopia and can definitely yield a nice shiny trophy for your lookup if you take the time to think about how it works. It’s a luck game, but it is also possible to calculate the odds of success, which means although you cannot guarantee a win, you can play in an efficient manner to achieve your goal.

When you enter the Grarrl Keno screen, you will see a grid of eighty eggs. All of those eggs contain a baby Grarrl just waiting to hatch out of its egg. Your job is to guess which eggs will hatch. You can pick up to ten eggs and the return you get depends on how many of those hatch. Ten of the eggs will hatch in every game.

In terms of time spent, once you press hatch and the game is finished, if you press back on your browser all your eggs you picked last time will be highlighted rather than having to select them all again, which saves a lot of time if you are trying to win with a particular selection of eggs.

There are two ways to play. The first is for the avatar and the second is for a trophy. If you are playing this to earn neopoints, then the chances are you are in the wrong place. The odds are against you; it is very likely you will lose.

Playing for the avatar

Now I could tell you the best way to play for the avatar and the requirements, but if I did the meepits would take me away and bury me neck deep in the Lost Desert. I will therefore simply say that there is a Grarrl Keno avatar and if you want it the strategy below for getting a trophy is very unlikely to yield success.

Playing for a trophy

Playing for a trophy requires thought and some fairly straightforward math. The high score table for Grarrl Keno represents the highest amounts won in a single game that month. The first step is therefore to work out how much you think you need to get onto the high score table (you have to be in the top 17 when trophies are handed out just before midnight NST). If you want gold, the target will need to be higher than if you are happy to settle for a bronze.

Having established our target score, we need to work out what the maximum number of neopoints we can use in a game is. This is equivalent to 50 neopoints, plus 2 neopoints multiplied by the number of days old your account is. So for example, an account 1000 days old can play with 50 + (1000x2) = 2,050 neopoints. Alternatively, go to the Grarrl Keno game page and it will tell you your maximum, which is easier and avoids the risk of calculating it incorrectly!

The next step is to divide the target amount by your maximum. This is the multiple you need to achieve your score. Say we wish to score 10,000 and our maximum is 2,050, we need a multiple of at least 10,000/2,050 = 4.87.

Now we could get into a lot of complicated math here about probabilities but I think we will just neatly dance around the details. If you do want to look into the math further, then you want to be looking up examining probabilities in keno. For those of you that did look it up, yes the odds of a win have been rounded and no you don’t get extra credit.

Below is the table you need to refer to:

Multiple	No. eggs picked	No. eggs matched	No. Plays to win
2	4	2	15
3	3	2	26
5	2	2	70
8	6	4	588
25	3	3	667

You know what multiple you need from the above steps, so starting at the top of the table work down the multiples until you reach the one you need. In the example above I needed 4.87, so I’m looking at the row showing a multiple of 5 (always round up; if you round down, you won’t achieve your target score). To have a multiple of 5, I need to pick 2 eggs and both of them need to be matched. On average, this will take 70 games to get a win matching 2 numbers.

The reason a multiple of 4 doesn’t appear is because the best option to get a multiple of 4 is to match 4 from 8 which will happen on average every 152 games. Well, we can win a multiple of 5 matching 2 from 2 every 70 games so this is a better option. The same principle is true for multiples of 6, 7 and 9 through to 24. I didn’t go beyond a multiple of 25 as the chances of a win are getting ridiculously small and the cost exorbitant. If you can’t get a trophy with a 25 multiple, then I suggest you wait for your account to get a bit older before you try for the trophy.

Clearly it’s advantageous to be able to use a lower multiple. If you had a maximum of 5,000, then to achieve the 10,000 target we only need a multiple of 2, which means matching 2 eggs from 4 picked, which will happen on average every 15 times. This means getting a trophy in this game is easier for old accounts as they have a higher maximum.

Now I feel it is important to point out this trophy is very likely to cost you neopoints. To go back to our example of a 2,050 maximum and trying to match 2 from 2 to achieve a multiple of 5, we are on average going to have to play 70 times at a cost of 2,050, a total of 143,500 neopoints. When you win you will earn 5 x 2,050 = 10,250 neopoints. This means a net cost of 143,500 – 10,250 = 133,250 neopoints. It could be more, the 70 plays is an average, so please ensure that you do the above calculation for your particular plan and are prepared to invest that much of your neopoints in a trophy attempt.

I hope you find this guide useful and good luck getting a new avatar (if you can work it out) and trophy for your account.