Bingo is the age old game that is believed to have originated from 16th century Italy, where it is still traditionally played on a Saturday night.

From the cost of the Meditteranian though, it has spread right around the globe with the game becoming hugely popular in the US and especially in the UK, where dedicated bingo clubs can be found in most major cities.

The advent of the internet though has taken the game out of dark smokey halls, and has allowed bingo to shake off its sterotypical image of a game played by pensioners.

Today, millions of people of all ages regularly play bingo from the comfort of their own home with the largest bingo sites offering life changing amounts of cash to the lucky winners.

How to Play Online Bingo

One of the reasons that Bingo has become so popular is because it’s incredibly easy to play. There are no complicated rules or strategies involved, meaning that even new players can become winners straight away!

All bingo games start with the purchase of a bingo card – how many cards you buy is completely up to, but the more you buy, the better change you have of wininng.

Each card will contain a selection of 15 numbers all between 1 and 90.

Once everybody has bought their card(s), numbers will be randomly drawn one at a time and shown to the players. Each of these balls will have a number on it, and if that number matches up to one of the numbers on your cards, it will be crossed off.

Each bingo game will award three prizes:

• The player who manages to cross off a complete horizontal row will be awarded the first prize
• A bigger prize will then be given to the first player who is able to complete two rows
• The final (and biggest prize) is awarded to the first player able to cross off all the numbers on one of their cards.

Online Bingo Software

While there are so many different bingo rooms out there for you to play at, you may well find that a lot of them look very similar to each other in the way that they’re laid out.

This is because there are only a handful of companies out there that provide good bingo software. Therefore, while the likes of Paddy Power, and Mecca are all separate bingo rooms in their own right, they all use the same software to provide bingo games to their players.

Virtue Fusion (now owned by Playtech) is the software company behind many of the most popular online bingo rooms. Their software is fast, user friendly and allows players to compete for some of the biggest prizes in bingo.

Other popular software companies include Parlay and Dragonfish, who run the popular bingo rooms 888 Ladies and Costa Bingo.

Best Online Bingo Sites

When choosing the best bingo site for you, there are a number of factors to consider:

• What sort of games do they offer?
• What kind of bonus will you get when you deposit?
• Will you get additional reload bonuses to take advantage of once you’ve made your initial deposit?
• Does the site offer free bingo games?

Best Online Bingo Bonuses

Any poker room of note will offer new players a bingo bonus when they sign up to the site.

This bonus usually takes the form of a match bonus whereby a percentage of your first deposit will be given back to you as you continue to play.

For example, if you deposit at a site offering a 200% match bonus up to £250, you can expect to receive double your first deposit back as bonus funds (up to a maximum of £250).

However, there’s even better news as many sites will now give you free cash to play with without you even needing to deposit anything. 888 Ladies for example will give you a completely free £5 just for registering with the site meaning that you can play for some big prizes without even needing to reach for your credit card.

Bingo Variants

As bingo has moved on to the internet, different variations of the game have gradually emerged. The rules are still the same, but the way the game is played has been tweaked a little bit to allow players more enjoyment.

The most popular variations of bingo are as follows:

90 Ball Bingo

This is the traditional game of bingo which is normally associated with the bingo clubs found in the UK.

A strip of six tickets are purchased with every number from 1-90 appearing somewhere on your strip.

Each ticket will contain 15 numbers divided between three rows and nine columns.

Numbers are placed on the ticket as follows, so that they’re easier to find:

• The first column of each ticket will contain numbers under ten.
• The second column holds number between 10-19
• The third has numbers between 20-29
• The fourth from 30-39
• The fifth will hold a couple of numbers between 40-49
• The sixth is numbered from 50-59
• The seventh from 60-69
• The eighth from 70-79
• The nineth from 80-90

90 Ball Bingo Winners

Three cash prizes are handed out in each game:

• The first person to cross out 1 line
• The first person to cross out 2 lines
• The first person to get Full House (i.e. cross out all of the numbers on their card)

There is no real pause between the first and the second prizes being won, so games are played quite quickly. Once someone has ticked off all their numbers (and therefore got the ‘Full House’), the game is over.

90 Ball Bingo Prizes

The amount of cash players win in Bingo totally depends on how much the price of the ticket is. The bigger the game, the larger the jackpot will be.

Similarly, the more people that are playing the more cash that there will be on offer.

In other words, 20 people playing a 2p game of bingo will be competing for a much smaller jackpot than would be found in a game of 10 players each paying 50p for a game.

The jackpot is divided between the three winners of each game with the size of the prize getting larger each time. Therefore, the player who completes 2 lines first will win more than the player who completed 1 line, whereas the Full House prize is generally much larger than both the other two combined and is where the real money is!

75 Ball Bingo

The game of 75 Ball Bingo started in the US but has really found its home online. It’s now just as popular as the more traditional 90 ball bingo and is perfect for those players looking for a quicker game.

75 Ball Bingo tickets are generally divided into 5×5 grids and are therefore different in appearance to 90 Ball Tickets.

At the top of each grid, the word B-I-N-G-O is usually spelt out with numbers being divided between them as follows:

• B – contains numbers 1-15
• I – contains numbers 16-30
• N – contains numbers 31-45
• G – contains numbers 46-60
• O – contains numbers 61-75

Depending on the site you play at, you may also find that the numbers are called slightly different with the column letter inserted just before the number itself. For example: G52

75 Ball Bingo Winners

The way that 75 Ball Bingo is played tends to vary from site to site. One common way of playing the game is to award prizes to the first player to make a vertical, diagonal or horizontal line on their card.

Once this has been completed, the final prize will be awarded to a player who can compelete a particlular pattern which is normally highlighted on the bingo card itself. This pattern is usually a recognisable symbol such as a letter of the alphabet, a number or perhaps a common shape such as a heart.

A variation on this theme sees many sites forget about the first prize and simply award a lump sum of money to the first player who is able to mark off a particular pattern.

The other common form of 75 Ball Bingo is more traditional and awards the prize to the first player to cross off all of the numbers on their card.

75 Ball Bingo Prizes

As with traditional 90 Ball Bingo, the size of the prize on offer will depend on the number of people playing and the price that they’ve paid for their tickets.

Generally speaking though, the prize for one line will be lower than the pattern prize.

Pattern bingo games have also started to offer progressive jackpotswhereby players who manage to complete their pattern within a certain number of calls (generally around 20 or 25) will win a significant amount of cash that has normally been accumulating for several months.

Bingo Chat Abbreviations

Once you start playing online bingo, you’ll find it’s a very sociable game. All bingo sites have a large chat box and on the busiest sites there’s plenty of fun to be had there.

However, you’ll find that a lot of players tend to use abbreviations when chatting so that they can keep an eye on their cards.

If you’re new to this, it can make a conversation slightly hard to follow. Therefore, we’ve compiled a list of the most commonly used terms so that you can follow what’s going on around you!

Bingo Lingo:

One of the things that has always been synonimous with bingo has been the rhyming words and phrases which are called out as each bingo ball is drawn.

Every ball has its own expression with some being more famous than other – number 88 is always known as ‘Two Fat Ladies’ for example and whenever the number 22 is drawn, it’s traditional for the audience to “Quack Quack” at the site of two little ducks.

A lot of the expressions aren’t quite so well know though, so with that in mind, we’ve produced the calls associated with every number in bingo.