Amazing Bingo Facts
- The largest bingo game in history took place at New York’s Teaneck Armory where 60,000 players played in the game. As if a 60,000-person bingo game isn’t impressive enough, 10,000 more people were turned away for fear of overcrowding the armory.
- The earliest form of bingo dates back to 16th century Italy when the Italians used a game called Lo Giucco del Lotto D'Italia to pick winners for their national lottery. The lottery-style game was quite similar to modern day bingo.
- Numerous celebrities play bingo including Robbie Williams, Sharon Osbourne, Catherine Zeta Jones, and Katie Price.
- The French were the first people to yell bingo numbers out loud, and also the pioneers of using markers on their cards.
- An estimated 7.5% of the world’s population plays bingo regularly. Of this 7.5%, women comprise 10% of bingo lovers while men make up 5%.
- Up until 1929, bingo was actually called “beano.” It wasn’t until a New York toy salesman named Edwin Lowe discovered beano at a carnival outside of Atlanta, Georgia that the name changed. He mistakenly though players were yelling “bingo,” and started marketing the game as bingo while selling it for $1 to customers.
- People in the UK spend more money on bingo tickets than they do on football events.
- Contrary to popular opinion, the primary motivation for playing bingo is not to win money. Instead, surveys show that the number reason for playing bingo is to have fun and socialize with friends.
- The history of bingo being used as a church fundraiser began when a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania priest approached Edwin Lowe about making him cards for the game. Lowe hired University of Columbia mathematician Carl Leffler to create a bingo card; Leffler created a card with over 6,000 number combinations on it before reportedly going insane.
- There are almost 1,500,000 different number combinations that can occur in 75-ball bingo.
- Germans used a game very similar to bingo during the 1800’s to teach multiplication tables to elementary school students.
- The average bingo game lasts around 4 minutes.
- In 1934, just four years after Wilkes-Barre started using bingo as a church fundraiser, there were an estimated 10,000 church bingo games a week throughout the United States.
- 70% of all bingo players are over the age of 35 while the other 30% are obviously 35 or younger.
- The largest single bingo prize ever awarded was $1 million at a huge game in the UK.
- Australia/New Zealand’s version of bingo, called housie, was developed in the early 1900’s. The differences in housie is the way numbers are called, and also in the way that the card is designed.
- Players have only 30 seconds or less to claim a win in live bingo.
