Online bingo may seem like a harmless pastime invented to keep senior citizens busy and provide them some entertainment, but in reality, it is a multi-million dollar industry. Contrary to popular belief, online bingo players are not senior citizens. As a matter of fact, only a mere 2% of these players are over 65 years old.
On the other hand, 29% of them are between 18 and 34. So much for the “senior citizen” myth, bingo is known for, world over. The above presented data concerns only online bingo though, the myth may still hold true for its real life “brick and mortar” variant.
The reason online bingo enjoys the popularity it does nowadays, is probably its simplicity. Together with slots, it is probably one of the easiest online gambling games to play, and as such, requires no special skills or knowledge to master.
The technology featured in most online bingo rooms, helps to further simplify the player’s tasks. Most online bingo rooms feature the “auto-daub” option, and this just about takes care of everything our guy needs to do. The auto-sort option will highlight and sort your cards according to which of them is closest to bingo, so you’ll be free to enjoy the feature online bingo rooms have become most-famous for: the chat.
The chat is meant to appeal to the predominantly female player-base, but its role exceeds that of a simple, pleasant exchange of niceties between two rounds of bingo. Every noteworthy online bingo room has CMs (Chat masters or Chat monitors) these people are specially hired personnel in charge of maintaining an upbeat atmosphere in the chat room, and of launching special chat games. These games can range from slots through roulette to Dodgeball, Bulls-Eye and you-name-it.
Only the imagination of the people who programmed the software can force a boundary on the types of games available in the chat room.
There are two types of bingo games played online: the American variant is played with 75 bingo balls, and cards featuring five rows and five columns are used. In Europe 90-ball bingo is popular, with cards featuring three rows and nine columns. As the numbers (the random-number-generator comes up with) are daubed on the cards, players look for a line or some other pre-determined pattern to come up. As soon as it does, they win.
In European bingo, there are three stages to a bingo game: a one liner, a two-liner and finally a full house play. The aim is to get a full (or two or three, respectively) horizontal line daubed out on the card. Three complete horizontal lines are called a full house.
On he world wide web, online bingo rooms are classified by the bingo-network they belong to. Pretty much the same way it happens in case of poker room networks, online bingo networks are clusters of different bingo rooms which share the same software and CMs. Thus, the graphics will look quite the same from room to room, though special skins can and are applied to differentiate.
Access to these rooms is usually achieved via the creation of a player account, after which the software can be downloaded. From there on, things go down pretty much the same way they do in the case of online poker rooms.
You get the software, you check it for system requirements, you install it, run it, log in with the account you’ve created, and start playing. The system is free of cheats, and player collusion, or botting is out of the question, given the nature of the game. You’ll always get a 100% fair game in an online bingo room. Trust issues will come down to whether you receive the money you’ve won in time or not.
Support is generally not an issue either in online bingo. Since the CMs are there all the time, they also provide full time support and assistance with whatever problem you may encounter.
At the moment, there are approximately 3 million online bingo players worldwide, with the vast majority of them concentrated in the US, UK and Japan. Most of these players are female and 90% of them is under 50. These players spend around 120 British pounds /month on average in their online bingo room.
Multiply that by 3 million (the estimated number of worldwide bingo players) and you’ll see why you can no longer regard bingo as a lame little afternoon joke meant to lighten granny’s day a bit.
