For many people, the game of bingo brings up one image only. It’s a room full of people from the older generation with their heads down leaning over their paper tickets, marking off numbers on their tickets that match the number calls made by the bingo caller. The tension mounts as more and more people only have a few numbers left to cross off and then suddenly someone pops the balloon of excitement for everyone else in the room by shouting ‘bingo’ – they’ve won and everyone else has lost.
However, today, there are different faces to the game of bingo and all of them have their own pros and cons.
Online bingo
The majority of bingo players who play today will never have stepped foot in a bingo hall; they’ll only ever have played the game online. There are, in fact, more than 100 million players registered at different online bingo sites around the world and more join sites like 32red, Gala, Bingo Hall and Sky Bingo every day, making the most of the welcome bonuses that double the amount of credit they add to their account or more. If you decide to play online bingo at 32redbingo.com, not only do you get £10 to try out the games on the site for nothing, you also get an extra £32 in credit for the first £10 of your own money that you pay into the account. For many players, half the reason that they decide to join an online bingo site is to take advantage of the bonus money that is on offer.
Once you’ve joined an online bingo site and become a depositing player, there are also other promotions to take advantage of. Every site has a promo tab where you can discover the latest offers. And there are also free games dotted throughout the bingo schedule, where although it costs nothing to play, there’s still a small cash prize to be won, so it’s always worth getting some tickets to take part.
Playing online you can play as many tickets as you want without fear of losing track of them. The auto-daub feature means that you will never miss out on a win. And although you play from any location, you never play alone. You can talk to other people playing on the site via the bingo chat rooms and many people enjoy this social aspect of the online game.
Video bingo
Playing bingo on a video bingo machine is another way to play this traditional game of chance. A video bingo machine looks a lot like a slot machine, with lights and symbols flashing. Video bingo machines are linked to other video bingo game terminals so that you don’t play alone – you play other people as you would be doing in a bingo hall or at an online bingo site.
You often find video bingo machines in a standard bingo hall, and people can play while they’re waiting for a real bingo game to start. One example of a video bingo game is Evergreen. The aim of the game is to get four corners on an electronic bingo card. Players can choose which card to play at the start of a round. The computer picks numbers randomly from B-1 to O-75 and these are displayed on the screen. As numbers which match the player’s cards come up on the screen, they have three seconds to hit the ‘daub’ button. In a game of Evergreen, if two or more players win at the same time (get all four corners marked) then the prize pot is split. And just to make things more interesting, if a player wins with the first four balls called, there’s a progressive jackpot to be won.
Other video bingo games are almost over before they’ve begun. With all terminals connected to a single server (the tech replacement of the traditional bingo caller), with one push of a button, the calls for a whole game of bingo are made at once and the marking of each player’s card is done by the machine too. And if a player’s card pattern matches the server’s combination of numbers, that player wins. The game is over within seconds and there’s really no player involvement in the winning or losing of the game.
Video bingo in some ways lacks the participation that online bingo and bingo hall bingo games have. Of course, when you’re playing with paper tickets in a bingo hall, this is the version that requires the most concentration and player effort in order to win. But while you don’t have to concentrate on online bingo games, you do get to socialise with other players through the chat rooms – in fact, it can be more convivial than in a real bingo hall where hush is required during play so that people have an equal chance of hearing the bingo calls.
Out of the three choices of different ways to play bingo, video bingo seems to be the least preferable, and with the presence of so many bingo sites today, you’d have to suspect that the days of video bingo are numbered.
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