Luck of the winners

When La Libanaise des Jeux, the country’s sole concessionaire of lotteries and scratch-card games, introduced a new game last month, it was sheer coincidence that the launch event was held within five hours of a record-shattering lottery draw half a world away. Nobody could have predicted that Yawmiyeh, the new Lebanese daily draw game, would see the light just after the Powerball lottery in the United States declared that three winning tickets would each be eligible for 30 annual payments totaling around $533 million.    In many ways, the two games couldn’t be more different from one another. Powerball jackpot amounts are determined on basis of sales revenue from tickets and payouts are shared among winning tickets. Through two revisions over the past few years, Powerball structures have been rigged in favor of producing huge jackpots with ever-lower chances of reaping them. Yawmiyeh is structured to offer fixed odds –