How to Win at Bingo

Are there ways you an increase your chances of winning at Bingo? Here we look at tips to maximize your chances of winning at Bingo. Keep in mind that bingo is a game of chance, so you can only do so much to improve your odds.

I have often heard the question asked whether bingo a game of pure chance or if there is actually a way to win at bingo.

Really, bingo games do not have enough complexity for them to qualify as games that can help you beat the system. Most gambling experts would maintain that Bingo is a game of pure chance and that there is no way of improving your odds of winning against the house except in a very simplistic way.

The only way of increasing your odds of beating the house is to play in a game that has fewer people in it. For some, this would mean playing in bingo halls and at events on days when you know that there will be a small turnout of other players.

How to Win at Bingo
The obvious drawback of practicing this theory of winning is that many Bingo jackpots are not fixed but rather based on a percentage of profits gathered from admissions at the door or from the sale of Bingo cards. So the more admissions or Bingo cards sold, the higher the Bingo jackpot will be.

Still, given that Bingo is largely a game of fate there are some ways that you can use strategy to increase your chances of winning.

Tips To Winning at Bingo
One strategy to increase your odds at Bingo is to play as many cards at one time as you can. The key phrase in that statement is "as you can", because it hurts your odds to play more cards than you can keep up with.

Still, the more cards you are dabbing with your Bingo dabber at one time, the more chances you have of winning a Bingo. Thus it stands to reason that the most frequent Bingo winner would be the person who can work the most cards at one time.

Online Bingo
Playing as many cards as you can works well offline, though in online casinos you might find that you might not be able to play as many cards as you want. In some cases, both real and online casinos will simply make the rule that everyone must play the same number of cards at every game. This makes it more difficult for one player to have an advantage over others.

In the case of the online Bingo game, this gives the house a real edge over a mass group of players. This practice is also common in churches, which do not like the idea of one player winning because they had more money than the other players to invest in buying a lot of cards at once.

Still, if you can get a virtual monopoly by playing a large number of cards at once – some people play as many as twenty in one game – then do it as it greatly increases your chances of winning.
Counting Numbers

There is also very complex system based on predictability that is sometimes used by Bingo players to predict the outcome of the numbers. It is kind of similar to card counting in games of Blackjack that are played with a single deck.

To master this system requires a little bit of knowledge about mathematical probability. In this case you are counting Bingo Balls instead of cards. Usually bingo is played with only 75 balls. The mathematical likelihood of any number coming up is 1 in 75, so the random factor has what is called uniform distribution.

Some statisticians maintain that when it comes to Bingo the balls will fall in a uniform pattern as governed by the laws of probability. In the case of Bingo it means that there will be an equal number of odd and even numbers called and an equal number of high and low numbers. It is also likely that an equal number of numbers ending in 1’s, 2's, 3's, 4’s and so on will also be called.

Obviously, this means that if you can stay in the game long enough, sooner or later your number is going to come up. This has lead some Bingo theorists to speculate that winning at Bingo has more to do with your ability to stay in the game as long as possible than it does blowing all of your money on a lot of cards for a single play.

If this is the case you might want to consider buying fewer cards and staying in the game longer rather than playing many cards at once. Of course, if you are playing online bingo for free, this is not going to be necessary because you don’t pay for the cards usually.

The Tippett Theory
Another strategy has to do with a complex theory about randomness that was invented by British statistician L. H. C. Tippett.

Tippett’s theory was that the more bingo numbers that are called, the more likely the numbers called are going to be to the median number which is 38. Therefore, if you are playing a short game and can select your cards, you are best to choose numbers closer to 1 and 78.

However, if you are playing a game that is longer in length, then choose cards with numbers that are closer to 38.

How do you tell if a Bingo game is going to be longer or shorter? Usually you can tell by the pattern chosen. For instance S, U or Four Corners shapes take a lot longer to win than a simple single diagonal line in Bingo.

Still, there are no real statistics (which can be proven by examining the records of Bingo winners) to prove that Tippet’s theory is true.

Jim Loy's site has a great article about how to win at bingo, basically relating some information he'd read in a book of that name. That might be a worthwhile additional resource.