Bingo is a card game popular in the southwestern part of the United States and is one of the world’s most popular games. In the United States, bingo is simply a game of luck where each player matches up numbers printed on different colored cards with numbers that the game master randomly chooses, marking the chosen numbers with dice. The game is typically played indoors or in coffee shops and restaurants as a form of relaxation and entertainment. Bingo is so popular that millions of people play it regularly throughout the world.
To play, a person blindfolded is told to say a word, such as “Bingo”, and then look at a card printed with a letter-number combination. If that letter-number combination is revealed, the person must then say the word again, while looking at the bingo card. That is, if someone wins, the caller will reveal that words that have been drawn. If no one wins for a certain amount of time, the caller will get another letter or number from the deck, and the process will repeat until someone wins.
Bingo scorecards come in two formats, paper and electronic. Paper bingo sheets consist of a large square of laminated paper, four rows of ten bingo squares. The squares are labeled A through L, so it is easy for players to know which square is to be called for a specific game. Once a game is started, the four corners of the paper are turned over, one after the other, to form a rectangular shape. The numbers on the scorecards are printed in upper case letters.
Electronic scorecards are almost identical to the paper variety, except that players can see their scores immediately. This allows them to keep track of their progress during the course of a game and helps them determine where they stand. Most online sites offer both formats. Players can register and login with an account, giving them full access to their account and bingo cards. They can then choose which format they prefer and create a new game.
Once the caller chooses a game, the computer will randomly generate a random letter-number combination. The numbers that are generated are not the same for each game. The letters are arranged in ascending or descending order, allowing players to easily identify which square they are playing for. For every letter, the corresponding number is also written in the corresponding position on the bingo card. In electronic scorecards, the caller does not see which squares correspond to which letters; the numbers and letters are simply arranged for the player’s viewing. If someone wins, the corresponding letter will be printed on the square.
Since the random letters and numbers generated by the computer cannot be pre-arranged, players must use some ingenuity when laying out their bingo squares. They should carefully plan where the winning letters and numbers will be located, as well as where the other letters and numbers will be located on the bingo scorecards. The best strategy is to lay out the random letters and numbers in such a way that no two letters or numbers will be the same, in order to reduce the possibility of having your bet rejected.
