How To Play Bingo
To play bingo each player purchases
one or more cards divided into numbered and blank squares. A caller picks
numbers randomly, usually up to 75 or 90 in all. As the numbers are called,
all of the players scan their card or cards to see if that number appears.
If the number appears it is marked off for the duration of the game. The
first player to achieve a card (or a line) in which all of the numbers have
been called shouts "bingo" and collects the stake money (usually less a
specified percentage, if that is permitted by local law). In a popular
variation, the central square on the card is free, and the first player on
whose card five of the called numbers appear in a row (vertically,
horizontally, or diagonally) is the winner. The prize may be anything from
plush toys to thousands of dollars in cash, to cars, and with the advent of
online bingo, who knows?
How Much Does it cost?
| BINGO |
Big Bonus Bingo has 5, 10, 25 and 50 cent cards
for your playing pleasure.
|
| SLOTS |
5cent, 25cent games. Currently there are 8
different games offering one and five line payouts! |
| VIDEO POKER |
There are 5 cent, 25 and 50 cent games of Video
Poker. |
History Of Bingo
Bingo is a relatively new game, descendent from lotteries of old. Lotteries
were first organized and used collectively by the Italian government in the
1530's. Bingo's history stems from a French lotto lover who developed an
alternative version of the lotteries that existed at the time. The initial
alteration had three horizontal rows and nine vertical rows with numbered
and blank squares in random arrangements. The columns were broken into sets
of 10 numbers, 1-10, 11-20, all the way up to 90 in the last column. The
bingo balls were chips in those days, and pulled out of a sac by the caller.
The first player to cover a horizontal row was declared the winner.
In the 1800's Bingo variations began to be used as teaching devices. Germany
used a version intended to teach its youth multiplication tables. Other
educational lotto games existed for spelling, history, biology, you name it!
This trend has never died, a quick walk through your local toys-r-us will
most likely reveal a Milton Bradley variation of the game with Sesame Street
characters, intended to teach numbers and counting.
Up until this point though, bingo was not bingo, it was still known as a
lotto game or variation. The coining of the term bingo is most often
attributed to a slip of the tongue, in the excitement of yelling 'Beano'!
Beano was the name of a carnival game traveling around New York state around
the same time that Edwin S. Lowe was searching for a game to rescue his
struggling toy company venture.
Lowe tells the story of going back to New York and gathering up beans,
rubber stamps and cardboard cards to hold his own beano get-together with
friends. As a sort of test Lowe acted as the caller, and it wasn't long
before he realized the addictive qualities of the game. In one of these
initial games, a friend of Lowe's was fast approaching a winning card as
Lowe watched with fascination. As the woman approached the win she became
more and more exciting, more tense, and finally when she won she jumped up
and tried to stammer out 'beano!' but it came out garbled as 'bingo!'.
Lowe describes the moment as momentous (yes, that's how I'm describing
that), and recalls knowing at that point in time he would be marketing the
game as Bingo!
One story always mentioned when discussing the history of bingo is about the
one man who went insane over the game (yes, a million women have followed
suit). The tale goes as so: Lowe was approached a couple of years after the
release of Bingo by a parishioner who had adopted the game as a church
fundraiser. The parishioner had come across the problem of cards with the
same number combinations, in which there were multiple winners on the same
game. To circumvent this Lowe approached a pre-eminent mathematician of the
time, Carl Leffler of Columbia University. Leffler took on the task of
creating 6000 unique Bingo cards, slowly working them out one card at a
time. Being paid on a cards produced basis, Leffler found the more he made
the harder his job was, and near the end was charging $100 for each unique
card produced. As the story goes, soon after completing the task of creating
all 6000 cards, the professor went insane, perhaps by direct result! The
rest, as they say, is bingo history.
