Bingo’s a game that has been around for centuries in one form or another, but with the name bingo for almost a hundred years. It’s a game that for many years used to ‘belong’ to the older generation, but since it went online, it’s become hugely popular with younger people too. Now, if you enter a bingo chat room on any of the bingo sites such as bgo, Gala or Cheeky Bingo, you’ll find people of all ages all enjoying the simple game of bingo that could lead to amazing prizes.
Bingo’s always been a popular game; now it’s online its fanbase is bigger than ever
So what other facts can we tell you about bingo?
- The game of bingo has been around for centuries in one form or another. One of the original games which is thought to be a predecessor of bingo was the ‘gioco del lotto del Italia’, which was played in the 1500s.
2) Bingo was first patented in the 1930s by a salesman called Edwin Lowe. He employed a maths professor to come up with multiple new combinations of numbers for the games. According to legend, Carl Leffler ended up going insane having come up with more than 6,000 new combinations of numbers.
3) Many of the bingo sites today have celebrity brand ambassadors. At bgo, the new face on the site is socialite Paris Hilton, but Verne Troyer has been the main brand ambassador for a couple of years now. Costa has Mel B and Jackpot Joy has Babs Windsor.
4) Bingo is great value. Nearly every bingo site will give new players a generous welcome bonus when they sign up, making the game cheaper than ever to play. At bgo.com/bingo, there’s a 400% bonus to cash in on when you first join the site, turning an initial deposit of £10 into £50.
5) Now that you can play online, bingo’s a lot easier than it used to be. The software marks the numbers off for you, and if you’re going to get a win, it gets registered automatically, so there’s no need to rush to beat other players to declare a win.
6) As bingo games take care of themselves online, that leaves the player free to socialise with other players in the bingo chat rooms, as well as playing side games on the bingo site while their bingo games play through.
7) One of the biggest online bingo prizes ever was £5.8 million from a 30p stake. Job centre worker John Orchard was playing a slots game on ButlersBingo when he had his massive win in 2012.
8) The biggest win in a UK bingo hall came in 2008, when a cleaning lady called Soraya Lowell won £1.2 million. She generously split the win with her neighbour and regular bingo partner, who happened not to have been at the bingo hall that day.
9) In the 1930s in America, movie goers took part in a different form of bingo called Screeno. Anyone who bought a ticket to the movies got to play a game of Screeno for free while they were there.
10) Part of the fun of bingo is the lingo that goes with it. In traditional games of bingo, the caller always used to call out the number, along with a set phrase for each number. For example, 22 was Two Little Ducks, because that’s what the numbers look like (kind of), and 11 was Legs Eleven, as the numbers looked like a pair of legs. In the same vein, 88 was Two Fat Ladies, probably not very politically correct today, but still a bingo tradition.