Traditionally Bingo is a game played in a social environment where players mark off cards as a caller draws numbers randomly. The winner is the player who can mark off all the numbers first.  More and more bingo halls were being opened until 2005 saw the start of a steady decline in revenues and the closure of the venues. Critics say that the rise in online gambling has contributed to the decline of traditional bingo halls but also that the smoking ban introduced in 2007 in the UK has contributed to it too. Bingo is not a game players can leave and come back to hence the smoking ban having such a drastic effect on the traditional way of playing.  The game was always deemed as a past time of the elderly but now it has become more popular with younger people. If you’re one of the curious ones out there, learn more about online bingo below.

How to win on Bingo

So how to win? Bingo isn’t the kind of game where a player can walk away from it and revisit it. Despite the image of bingo being that of an elderly crowd and therefore not deemed as quite so exciting, bingo is actually a quick paced game and players need to stay alert at all times in order not to miss a number being called.  Bingo is a random game; no amount of strategizing is going to help unfortunately.

However, joseph Granville, did adopt a strategy for playing bingo. Granville deduced the odds on whether the game was a seventy five ball game, an eighty ball game or a ninety ball game; the more balls the higher the odds. When playing he also adhered to choosing his bingo card wisely and chose bingo cards with as much variation as possible as it is easier to control the bingo card then it is the numbers called. 

Odds of winning at Bingo

The odds of winning are also dependent on the number of bingo cards currently being played. Identifying the number of players in the room and estimating that they may have between two and four cards each will give the player a rough percentage of probability of winning the jackpot. Where this strategy does not work is if the bingo game being played is a progressive jackpot game. A progressive jackpot bingo game can happen across land based traditional bingo halls where the same chain of bingo halls can play the same game at the same time nationally. In these circumstances players will struggle to determine the number of players in the overall game and therefore applying this strategy won’t always work. Normally, however, in a land based traditional game of progressive bingo players may wait months for the jackpot to be paid out with games being rolled over on a regular basis.

Bingo is an entirely random game but there are clever things for players to consider in order to maximize winning potential. If a player plays to win then they should play at an off peak when there aren’t so many players participating rather than when there are lots of players competing. Controlling the number of cards the player is using is also an important part of the game.