In the United States, bingo has been a popular game of chance where each player completes cards with the pre-printed numbers that the game’s host draws from a hat in random. In simple terms, the host is the person who places the card numbers before the participants and the players are there to try and match the pre-printed numbers. The object of the game is simple: win. However, because some people feel it is an easy way to win, many bingo websites offer a chance to win cash prizes through Bingo games.
There are several sites offering cash prizes in the form of gift cards, gift certificates, restaurant coupons and so on. The concept of awarding customers with prizes through a social networking site like LinkedIn, twitter, Facebook and so on, was seen as a means to award customers while at the same time reducing fraud and money theft. Bingo has been used in various forms of entertainment, both on and offline, for quite some time and as such it has experienced a surge of popularity on the internet. This surge of popularity may have resulted from the introduction of Bingo games on social media sites.
One of the most popular games on bingo websites is the game beano, which has the participant mark a line with a card or a symbol by indicating the answer to a question. For example, one might set up a bingo game on LinkedIn where participants would type in ‘beano’ as the question they want the bingo website to answer. The last person who wins will get the prize associated with that letter. Facebook is another major social networking site that offers bingo games. In fact, one could argue that the rise of bingo popularity on Facebook is directly related to the rise of Bingo games, since Facebook is where bingo players usually congregate and play.
The rise of bingo could also be attributable to the ease with which people are being able to meet others who play the game on a regular basis. Bingo cards are now available online for free, making them much more accessible than they were before. Many people who once only dreamed of having their own bingo cards are now able to buy and print their own. Bingo websites also allow users to add their own bingo cards and thus create their own unique bingo set.
Some historians believe that the birth of the game of bingo may have been traced back to ancient Greece, where the custom of playing the game was found in temples. Since many of the spectators at these ancient Greek temples did not have access to cash, they used ordinary objects as money, such as beans and nuts. Thus, the legend of the bingo game goes that the winners of the beano had to pay off the spectators in order to be eligible to take part in the temple lottery.
The origin of online bingo can be traced back to an Italian friar who developed an algorithm which allowed the generation of combinations from numbers already available in the Italian language. Because this algorithm required bingo cards to be printed out, the popularity of the game picked up and it became popular in Britain and other European countries, as well as in North America. Today, players use their own unique sets of bingo cards and do not have to rely on the random numbers generated by the generator at the bingo hall. With some thirty billion possible numbers, the potential for winning is truly Endless.