12 Interesting Facts about Bingo

As the leading pastime world wide, in a combination of entertainment and gambling capacities, bingo has a long history and myriad facts surrounding its existence and undeniable popularity. As strange and hare-brained as some of them may be, they are all true, and for any genuine fan of the game, very interesting indeed.

1. Bingo originated as a lotto game in Italy that migrated to other parts of Europe in the 1700s. It was introduced to the US by a German man who ran a traveling carnival, and thus picked up by toy manufacturer Edwin S Lowe in 1929 who marketed it as Lowe’s Bingo.
2. When Edwin Lowe discovered the game, it was called Beano because players used dried beans to cover their numbers. The name Bingo came along when some of Lowe’s friends were playing the game during a test run and one of them jumped up and, in his excitement, accidentally shouted “Bingo” instead of “Beano”.
3. The game of Bingo was first used in Germany for educational purposes dating back to the 19th century.
4. In 1930, long before the invention of computers, Professor Carl Leffler was hired by Mr. Lowe to devise as many random variations of 75-ball bingo cards as possible. Leffler designed 6,000 cards before he went insane.
5. The most serious bingo fanatics are known to be highly superstitious and will find luck in anything from seats and daubers to their choice of underwear. Many bingo players will circle their seat three times before sitting down to produce good luck.
6. It has long been thought that bingo was a ‘senior citizens’ game. However, statistics show that 30% of all bingo players are 35 years of age or younger, making it the most popular game among all age groups.
7. There are approximately 552,446,474,061,128,648,601,600,000 different possible card combinations in 75 Ball Bingo. If you were to print a million bingo cards per second, it would take 17.5 trillion years to print them all!
8. Men with the name Joe, and women with the name Margaret, win bingo more often than men or women by any other name.
9. According to a 2006 press release on the BBC website, 5% of the UK’s population participates in online bingo games on a regular basis.
10. The UK hosts a daily National Bingo Game. The largest single prize to date awarded was over EUR 1,100,000.
11. Bingo is the most popular form of charitable fund raising in the United States. Americans spend an average of $90 million on bingo cards every week.
12. According to scientific studies, playing bingo is good for the brain. Bingo players are statistically better at performing specific mental tasks than those who do not play bingo.