The history of online bingo

Today, millions of people all over the world enjoy a game of bingo, but this isn’t a new phenomenon; people have been enjoying playing bingo for centuries. It’s only in the last decade though, that the introduction of online bingo has given the traditional game a new lease on life.

Although there are still a few bingo halls to be found in different towns around the UK, this isn’t where the bulk of bingo games are being played today – they’re going on in living rooms, on buses and trains, in doctors’ waiting rooms, wherever people have access to the internet, in fact, and some time to spare.

There are lots of different versions of online bingo that you can find on different gaming sites worldwide, but they all stem from the original game that began with a national lottery in Italy called ‘Lo Gioco del Lotto d’Italia’ back in the 1500s. The game caught on quickly and soon different versions appeared across Europe. Early versions featured a card with three rows and nine columns with four free spaces on each row. The caller had wooden counters from 1 to 90, which he or she called out and players covered up the matching numbers on their playing cards. The first to cover up a whole row was the winner.

It was an American who took bingo to the next level. Edwin S Lowe saw a game of ‘beano’ played at a county fair in Georgia, where numbers were covered up by dried beans as they were called out. Once all the numbers had been covered up, the winner shouted ‘Beano’ to claim his prize. Lowe took the idea and marketed the game as ‘Lowe’s Bingo’, and the game became a really popular fundraiser for American churches and by 1934 more than 10,000 games a week were being played.

The rest, as they say is history, but in recent years, bingo had waned in popularity and fewer bingo venues were in use. Now though, with its renaissance online, bingo is more popular than ever and being played daily by millions of people of all ages all over the world. Lots of people play for the cash prizes, but there’s a great deal of socialising to be done in the modern game too, with access to different chat rooms on different sites being the main attraction for many players.