Bingo, also known by the name of Housie (NZ & Australia) or Housey (UK) is a popular gambling game. It’s generally played at large venues such as church hallway, rugby clubs etc. People buy tickets in order to try their luck out for huge prizes (money) at stake. As the game starts, numbers are announced randomly by a caller. Players strike them off in their tickets to attain the winning combination.
ALL ABOUT BINGO
A bingo ticket is divided into nine columns and three rows making it to be twenty seven free spaces in all. Now out of these nine spaces in each row five are filled with numbers and the remaining four are left blank. Columns can have either one, two or in rare cases three numbers. Numbers are placed in columns in such a way that column 1 gets numbers starting from 1 to 9, column 2 gets numbers starting from 10 to 19 and so on.
Game is looked over by a caller who calls out the random numbers. Before starting the game he describes the prizes/money at stake. The record payout for UK national bingo game was £950,000. It was awarded to a lucky player from Gala Sheffield Parkway.
Then the caller begins to call out the randomly selected numbers either by using a random number generator, by drawing out number tokens from a bag or by the help of electronic ball drawing machine. The numbers are announced in a specific format speaking the individual numbers separately and then as a group if any. For example 90 is announced as nine zero ninety to avoid any confusions.
People keep on striking off the numbers in their tickets with the help of a dabber or dauber in order to get a winning combination. Most general winning combinations are
Horizontal line which covers all the five numbers in a row
Complete covering two lines on the same ticket
Line covering all the fifteen numbers in the ticket also termed as FULL HOUSE
Instead of buying separate tickets, players in UK usually prefer to buy a book of six tickets containing all likely numbers but in different patterns.
Player calls out line or house when all the numbers required for winning have been marked off. An official checks the ticket of the concerned person for the claim. Nowadays a computerized number validating system is used by officials to save the time.
There is often a small interval between the consecutive sessions of the game. Housey is often organized in UK by churches, community clubs, charities and sports clubs in order to raise funds. It’s also a highly rewarding and ever increasing business for many companies.
Some of the largest companies with Bingo halls in UK are:
Gala bingo
Virgin bingo
Mecca bingo
Riva bingo
Sky bingo
Nowadays, online bingo is also gaining much popularity with many different big companies launching their own websites. Some of them are Ladbrokes, The Sun, and Bingolive365. Bingolive365 is the first online bingo company to offer live & interactive service to its callers all over the world.
By: Neeraj S Sharma
Most people are familiar with the game of bingo, although, to be fair, many of us think of it only as a kids game or a game played by seniors at social events. While I wouldn’t want to deny that the game is played in these situations, bingo can be a lot of fun for people of all ages, and has also found use in classrooms as an educational tool.
The basic idea of bingo is that each player is given a bingo card. The card contains squares, within in each of which, is a randomly selected number. A bingo caller reads out numbers in a random order, and players mark off the corresponding squares on their cards. The objective of the game is to be the first player to achieve a winning combination of marked off squares – depending on the particular variant of bingo being played, this may for example be one or more straight lines going all the way across the bingo card.
One of the reasons why bingo can be adapted to different situations is that you don’t have to play using cards with numbers. Instead of numbers, bingo cards could be printed with words, phrases or even musical symbols. Thus the game can be adapted to different holiday themes such as Christmas, July 4th, New Year, or Halloween, to social events such as baby showers or wedding showers, to the classroom, by using bingo cards containing items chosen by the teacher, whether it be math problems (that the student must solve in order to mark them off), music symbols (that students must recognize), or even foreign language words (that students must translate).
To play a variant of bingo you will of course need to have special bingo cards with the items of your choice. You can create these by hand if you want to, but if you need a lot of bingo cards, it can be a lot of work. An easy solution is to use your computer – with the help of appropriate bingo card creator software, you just need to enter the list of words, phrases or items that you want, and the computer can generate the bingo cards for you with just a few mouse clicks.
By: Sunil Tanna
