Keno vs. Lottery: Just What Is It, Anyway?

The lottery is just a game. It's a game that people play in order to assuage their absolutely miniscule hopes of winning large sums of money. The chances of winning a lottery are worse than 1 in a million, yet people still buy lottery tickets and play specific lucky numbers. You can buy lottery tickets all your life and never win a penny; millions of people, in almost every country, do just that. And almost none of them ever win. By contrast, Keno is a winnable game. It may resemble a lottery, but it most certainly is not. So in the Keno vs. Lottery race, what do you choose? The answer should be obvious.

Keno vs. Lottery: Who Comes Out On Top?

The lottery is just a game. Almost every country has it and it allows you to choose numbers on a ticket in the hopes that those numbers will come out of that little PowerBall machine on the television later that night. In appearance, at least, it resembles the Keno card, in which players choose their numbers and hope that those numbers are called. But that is where the similarities end because Keno has a lot of history whereas the lottery, well…just doesn't.
If you're thinking that the name Keno looks kind of like the word for five in any Latin-based romance language (as if there were another kind), then you're right. The name actually comes from the French and Latin words for five (quine and quini, respectively). Deceptively, however, the game actually originates in China, where the game consists of sheets covered with 80 different Chinese characters. Chinese immigrants brought the game to the United States when many of them came to work on the railroads. Modern Keno, as it is played in casinos around the world, comes with a scorecard, sometimes called a ticket, in which players may choose their own 20 numbers. The game is still played with 80 balls with numbers on them; these are the numbers that are called out throughout the game. The fact that the players have the ability to choose what goes on their tickets gives each player a big advantage. Instead of being handed a card with numbers already arranged on it in specific places, players may choose where to place each number and thus, how and what they bet on in each individual game. And since different games are played with different amounts of money being wagered, this allows the player to be fairly in control of what he or she actually plays.
The lottery, though it does have some history throughout the ages as a method of raising money for taxes, is little-documented. The Huns used it as early as 200 BCE in the manner previously mentioned. It is also occasionally postulated that the concept of the lottery may appear in Europe as early as the days of Julius Caesar. Little of this is ever analyzed or proven, but I think that everyone would agree that the lottery just doesn't have the character that a game like Keno has. So, in the great Keno vs. Lottery race, who wins? Probably Keno.