Top 10 Facts About Bingo*

I love a good night out at the Bingo; it’s not just for older women, in fact playing Free Bingo online is growing at a ridiculous rate! So off the back of that I though I would put together ten fun random facts about Bingo…

Did you know Bingo wasn’t originally called Bingo, it was called Beano and it was played at most Country Fairs.

Bingo dates back as far as 1530 where Italians played a lottery style game that they still play every Saturday night!  It took quite some time to leave Italy, over 200 years, when the French picked it up. By the 1800’s the Germans had their own version in which they taught to children to improve their math skills.  It didn’t reach the USA until 1929 and within it’s first five years the popularity grew to over 10,000 games being played weekly.

The chap that invented the Bingo card was called Carl Leffler and he was a university professor at Columbia University.  They originally made over 6,000 variations of the card, and there is a ridiculous 552,446,474,061,128,648,601,600,000 (yes that is a real number) possible arrangements on one card.

In Australia, until recently, Bingo was called Housie and was played outside under a large marquee. Instead of calling out ‘Bingo’ or ‘Beano’, the player would shout ‘House!’

The clever folk over at Southampton University have actually proven that playing Bingo helps keeps your mind healthy.  Crazily enough they even say that it can be as good for you as exercising… pass me the Bingo marker.

There are more than 3.5 million regular players in UK; out of these a super high one in five Scots plays regularly, compared with only one in 20 in south of England.

On average a player will spend £15-20 a night, and that’s not counting the winnings they reinvest.

The world’s biggest ever Bingo win came from a 30p bet back in December 2012 when a Jobcentre worker scooped a life changing £5.9 million. According to research 96% of regular bingo players have won the jackpot prize at least once!

In America Bingo is played with a smaller amount of balls, they only use 75 compared to the 90 in which we use in the UK.

And to finish up with a bit of a shocker, 80 per cent of all of the world’s bingo players are women aged between 30 and 50 years old and in the UK over 700,000 players aged between 18 and 24; not so old after all!

 Do you play online bingo? If not, you should try Bingo Extra.