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Comprehensive Guide to Playing Bingo Online
Forget the bingo halls and church basements. At Bovada's online casino, there are 11 different types of bingo games to play available at the casino—and players can play them all from the comfort of home for real money. Simply boot up your computer, or whip out your smartphone, and choose between American Bingo, European Bingo, 80-Ball and 30-Ball Bingo, a customizable bingo, and a series of six online bingo games that will take you on a virtual tour across South America.
Anyone looking for a fresh new way to play a popular game as ancient as bingo will appreciate some of the novel features included in our online bingo games—such as the Extra Balls feature that lets you request more gambling numbers when you’ve just missed out on a winning line. That means there’s no more wondering what the next number would have been. There are also mini online games and progressive real money jackpots included in a lot of these popular gambling games. This is bingo like you’ve never seen or played before.
This comprehensive online free bingo casino guide explains everything you need to know if you’re just learning how to play bingo online for the first time with real money. In order to provide some context for the popular game, we’ll look back at its gambling history before we move on to explain how the modern-day game of bingo works. We’ll also point out some important casino things to consider when you develop your bingo play strategy, like how to assess the value of a casino game based on the pool of numbers and potential draws.
History and Rise of Online Bingo
Bingo has been played in one way or another in Europe for the last 500 years. It first started in Italy as a national lottery called Lo Giuoco del Lotto D’Italia. Every week, players would buy cards with numbered squares on them, and on Saturdays, the bingo caller drew the winning numbers from a bag.
In the 1770s, Bingo made its way to France where the layout of the cards were changed to include three horizontal rows and nine vertical lines. Five numbers from a pool of 90 were placed in each row.
American Bingo came about in 1929 when a toy manufacturer by the name of Edwin Lowe visited a carnival in Atlanta, Georgia. Under the big canopy, a group of people were playing beano, and they kept wanting to play more and more rounds even after the caller was trying to shut things down for the night. Inspired and motivated by the crowd’s thirst for this popular gambling game, Lowe manufactured his game, which he called Bingo, after pairing up with a mathematics professor to help him generate unique number combinations for 6,000 cards. Once Lowe introduced bingo to the American public, it didn’t take long for the demand for the game to skyrocket—especially with churches looking to raise real money for charitable events.
Bingo’s transition to the online realm was inevitable in the gambling industry. The game had been featured on the radio and TV, so when the internet became mainstream in the ‘90s, Bingo was one of the first online specialty games added to many virtual casinos.
How Online Bingo Works
At Bovada's online casino, we have several different types of Bingo games available and each has its own different online flair, but the basic play premise of the casino game is the same for all casino game versions, making it easy if you’re just learning how to play bingo. There is a pool of numbers (such as 1 to 90 with European Bingo), and numbers from that pool are selected at random and organized into rows and columns on the bingo cards. Players buy the bingo cards, and then the caller, which is automated when you play online, draws a pre-determined amount of winning numbers from the pool. As you hear the winning numbers called, you cross off any matches you get on your cards. If you cross off an entire line, you call out Bingo! and win a prize.
The Rules of Online Bingo
Online bingo rules depend on the version you’re playing, so we’ll go over the rules for the types of bingo offered at Bovada Casino, starting with our South American-themed bingo games.
South American Bingo Rules
Bingo Ribeirinhos, Bingo Goal!, Amazonia Bingo, Tribo Bingo, Cataratas Bingo and Pesca Bingo make up our suite of South American-themed bingo games. These games come with an Extra Balls feature and a mini game, and three of them offer progressive jackpots too. The Extra Balls feature pops up any time you’re one number shy of a win, and it will be obvious because the missed number(s) are highlighted yellow. You then get the opportunity to have extra numbers drawn for a fee. As the odds of landing a winning line increase, so does the cost for the extra balls.
You can trigger the mini rounds available in this suite of online casino bingo games by landing a certain winning pattern that’s outlined on the casino paytable. The bonus round takes place on a second screen where you’re tasked with a challenge in order to win extra coins.
Three of our online casino bingo games are equipped with progressive jackpots, which are pots of money that are funded by a portion of all incoming bets and continue to increase in value until someone triggers it. In order to win an online casino progressive jackpot playing bingo, players must land a winning line within the first 30 balls and be eligible for the prize by staking $1 or more on four cards for a total of $4 staked per game.
Standard Bingo Rules
The rest of our bingo games are more traditional than the themed ones, try to play them all online. The classics lets players choose one of three options for how many balls the players want drawn. Keep in mind, the more balls that are drawn, the higher your odds of winning, whereas the fewer balls that are drawn result in bigger (but less frequent) payouts.
How to Win at Online Bingo
Bingo is a lottery, and to win the lottery, you need to buy lots of tickets. You can likewise buy a lot of bingo cards to increase your odds of winning, and you can also choose to have the maximum number of balls drawn if you play one of our online classic games. With 30-Ball, 80-Ball, American and European Bingo, players can buy up to 100 cards per round, making them a solid pick for those who want to win frequently. In the chart below, we’ve compared these four online games and their pool size with how many numbers players can have drawn from the pool in order to illustrate the odds of winning when they are playing these different online versions.
| Bingo Games | Maximum Draw | Pool | Percentage of Pool Drawn |
| 30-Ball Bingo | 24 | 30 | 80% |
| 80-Ball Bingo | 55 | 80 | 68% |
| American Bingo | 55 | 75 | 73% |
| European Bingo | 65 | 90 | 72% |
30-Ball Bingo has the most numbers drawn relative to pool size, so if players' goal is to be able to yell bingo from the top of your lungs, you can’t beat 30-Ball Bingo. If the size of the online payouts is more important, you may want to decrease the numbers drawn, or pick a game with a higher payout ceiling.
But payouts aren’t everything in the world of bingo. Casino players who prioritize fun enjoy our suite of South American bingo games because they offer a unique twist that’s refreshing to play. And finally, smartphone users will get the best experience possible playing Go-Go Bingo.
Different Types of Online Bingo Games
Learn a bit about the 11 online bingo games offered in our online casino; they’re listed below in alphabetical order.
Have 20, 22, or 24 numbers drawn from a pool of 30.
Have 35, 45, or 55 numbers drawn from a pool of 80.
Play bingo deep in the Amazon Rainforest, where mini games take you to an ideal area for spotting wildlife.
The American Bingo card has five columns, each headed with a letter from the word “Bingo.” At the center of the card, there’s a star that serves as a freebie.
A soccer stadium roars in Bingo Goal! Trigger the bonus round, and you’ll get to take a penalty kick against the opposing team.
A peaceful fishing village teetering over a river is the perfect place to enjoy a round of bingo.
Waterfalls cascade down mountains in this majestic bingo game. If you trigger the bonus round, you get to spin a wheel for extra prizes.
In Europe, bingo is played with three rows, nine columns and a pool of 90 numbers.
This streamlined customizable version of bingo is ideal for playing on small screens.
Take your bingo experience underwater where you’ll be surrounded by exotic fish. The mini round lets you pick and choose fish for extra cash.
A tribe of bingo players await your arrival in this version of bingo. If you trigger the bonus round, you get an opportunity to shoot arrows at a target for bonus money.
Ready to play bingo online? All of these bingo games are available to try for free using Practice Play mode, and for real money using Real Play mode. Experiment with them and see which ones you like the best to play. Chances are, bingo has changed quite a bit since the last time you played.
