Short History Of Bingo

The history of the humble bingo game can be traced back to the great Italy city states of the 1500s. ‘Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia’ was the first ‘National Lottery‘ which was played every week. From Italy, the game spread to provincial France and was known as ‘Le Lotto’ where it proved very popular amongst the rich French merchant classes. The Germans put an educational spin on the game and used it to teach children basic maths.

Bingo was mainly played in European fair grounds – the booth owner would pull numbered tokens randomly from a box and players would mark their cards with beans, hence the game became known as Beano. The first player to cover a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line on their card with beans would shout ‘Beano!,’ and claim a prize. Sometime in the 1930s a salesmen named Edwin Lowe from America came across the game in a Germany city, and decided to bring the idea back to the U.S. with him. On arrival back in the U.S. Lowe showed the game to his friends, one of them got quite excited when she won and called out ‘Bingo!’ instead of ‘Beano!,’ and the name stuck!

Lowe released a version of the game with a 12 and 24 card set, costing just a dollar or two dollars for the 24 card set. The game was a smash hit and spread quickly around the States, mainly being used to raise money for charitable causes by priests in Pennsylvania, but there was a problem in that the cards were delivering too many winners rather than the desired one or two, as previously they hadn’t been played by groups of players. The priest employed the services of a university mathematician at Colombia University, Carl Leffler, who invented 6000 different bingo card numerical variations. Bearing in mind there were no computers to help complete this task, the poor mathematician was driven insane – but the result was that there was now just one winner per bingo game.

Bingo didn’t become widely acknowledged until 1960, when the Gaming Act permitted such games to be played in members-only establishments. In 1968 a Gaming Board was set up to regulate Bingo clubs and another act was passed which allowed clubs to play bingo with cash prizes via tabletop coin slots. Bingo proved so popular that Bingo Halls were set up in all major towns in the UK, many of which still exist or have been revived in recent years.

Many people tried to imitate Lowe’s bingo game, but as he did not own the game, he asked that his competitors pay him $1 a year in return for using the name Bingo. This has resulted in Bingo being the generic name of all the variations of the game that exist today, including online bingo.

Online bingo has become extremely popular and figures released in 2007 by Global betting and Gaming Consultants, in a single year online Bingo generated wins of over £70 million, and it is predicted that the expected return on Bingo wins will reach £164 million by the year 2013! Bingo broadly appeals to women, with 85% of all online players being women. If you’d like to try online bingo for yourself then Jackpot Joy Bingo is the best place to play, you can join for free, you get a matched cash bonus on your first real money deposit and even regular games where the tickets are free.