The term bingo arrived during a game of Beano when Edwin S. Lowe in 1929 who after a game of Beano (a kind of Lotto) heard a fellow player uttering Bingo instead of Beano and thus Bingo came into being. Thus Lowe and another professor together developed the bingo cards. In the classic version of Lotto the playing cards were divided into three horizontal and nine vertical rows. The numbers were placed in a random arrangement with each horizontal row having five numbers and four blank squares. The vertical rows contained numbers from 1 to 10 in the first row, 11 to 20 in the second row, et cetera, up to 90. Apart from cards there were even chips that the players could buy. The callers would take out a small wooded numbered token and would call out the numbers in random. The first player to cover a horizontal row was the winner. There was also a big prize for the ‘eye’s down’ or a Full House and a bigger prize for the first to cover all the card numbers.
Initially there were no such laws or regulation to keep a tab on bingo as it was considered to be a fun game but in around the late 1960’s with the decline of movie halls and the increase of television sets bingo became commercialized and many cinemas in Britain became licensed bingo halls over which the Gaming Board of Great Britain from then till now holds a watching brief.
But if you are thinking that bingo was introduced only in 1929 then that’s not it, in fact it went back to 1530, to an Italian lottery called “Lo Giuoco del Lotto D’Italia,” which is still played every Saturday in Italy. In the 1770’s the game was introduced in France where it was called “Le Lotto” and then a version of it was played by the Germans and in around 1800.
The numbers and combination of numbers in the cards that we have today hasn’t been that easy and it did cost a lot of money in the initial years when they were being created and even a professors sanity. The story goes like this. After the game of bingo hit the market a priest from Wilkes-Barre approached Lowe saying that though bingo did pay off to some extent it also produced at least half a dozen or more winners and thus the amount of money that the winner received at the end became really low. The problem was that the combinations of numbers were so less that most people had the numbers on their cards. Seeing this Lowe sought the services of an elderly professor of mathematics at Columbia University, Carl Leffler. The professor decided to concede to his request on a certain amount per card combination. Professor Leffler realized that with each card it got difficult to create s different and unique combination. But by the end of the task the professor had 6000 cards and the price per card had risen to $100, and yes it also cost the professor his sanity!
Well after this amazing formation of bingo cards and combination of numbers bingo became popular and today as we all know from the bingo halls bingo is now online and there are more than 2000 bingo sites available world over. From Beano, Bingo has come a long way and with the bingo sites bingo has reached our bedrooms giving us immense amount of fun and happiness, (some easy cash is always welcome) and we can only thank Edwin S. Lowe and the later insane mathematics professor Carl Leffler.
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