Bingo Odds

One of the most overlooked aspects of bingo strategy is understanding simple odds. And since this is an overlooked aspect, you can gain a big advantage on other players by knowing basic bingo odds. With that in mind, the following are some bingo odds that will help you bring in more profits.

The most relevant bingo odds in terms of strategy are your odds of winning. To determine your odds of winning a bingo game, all you have to do is look at your cards as well as the total number of cards in play. So if you had 4 cards in a game with 80 total cards in play, your chances of winning would be 5%. Obviously it’s a lot easier to calculate your odds of winning in online bingo since the total number of cards in play is listed. It’s a lot trickier calculating your odds of winning in live play so you’ll have to count cards manually to come up with a number.

Online bingo is not like slots where you can find the payout percentage by emailing the casino. Instead, you must determine it yourself by taking the total amount of prize money and dividing it by the total number of money spent on the game. So if all cards in the aforementioned game with 80 cards cost $2, a total of $160 would be spent on the game. Assuming a single prize of $130 was offered, your payout percentage in this game would be 81.25% ($130/$160). 

And this number is accurate regardless of how much you spend on the game or how often you actually win. If you only bought one of the 80 cards in this game, you would still theoretically be earning 81.25% back over the long run. With this formula, your payout percentage will be different in every game; however, the key is to keep looking for games that offer you the highest expected payout percentage.

Some bingo players are sold on the fact that certain numbers come up more often than others in a game. For instance, if N-70 came up three times and N-44 wasn’t called at all, these players would assume that the game is biased towards N-34. But the truth is that all numbers have the same probability of coming up. So if you’re playing 75-ball bingo, every number has a 1.33% chance of being called while 90-ball bingo gives every number a 1.11% opportunity to be called.

Every player wants to know what their odds are of winning a progressive bingo jackpot. But the truth is that there’s no easy way of knowing what your odds are of winning a progressive bingo jackpot. Every time a person buys a card for the progressive jackpot, they increase the size of the prize. But one thing you can be sure of when going for a progressive bingo jackpot is that the longer it goes unclaimed, the better value you are getting out of your buy-in. The reason for this is because players have already added lots of money to the jackpot, so when you play for it later on, you are playing for a much larger prize at the same cost.

As you may know, coverall games crown the winner when somebody covers their entire card. The odds of a single person winning a 75-ball coverall game in just 24 calls is pretty slim at 0.00000000000000000004%. Even seeing somebody winning at 50 balls is pretty rare since each player has just a 0.000002263239% chance of winning. Of course, chances improve in a large game, but most coverall games are likely to be won when the number of balls called gets to 66 or higher (each person has close to a 1% chance of covering their card at this point).