A brief History of Bingo

Now that we have covered the history of Casinos and Gambling, let’s have a look at a game that is (unfairly, dare I say) associated with old cat ladies and grannies in general. Yes, you guessed it right – it’s Bingo.

You might be surprised to know that the history of bingo goes back to the tradition of (bet you can’t guess it!)…elections! In the Italian city of Genoa in the early sixteenth century there was a common form of elections to the Supreme Council – the members of the council were chosen by pulling special balls with numbers, so in fact, the seats in the direction of Genoa were chosen randomly.

Ancestor of the modern bingo is considered the Italian Lo Gioco del Lotto D’Italia, which had a huge popularity. The first mention of it dates as far as 1530. Games were held once a week, on Saturdays. Later, the game spread in other European countries, and by the 19th century it was well known all over Europe. The Russian version of bingo, known there as the loto, appeared around the time of Catherine II and quickly gained popularity among the upper class. Later on in the 20th century in the United States the game gained the name “Bingo”, since, instead of the lottery balls we are so familiar with today, they used beans. The winning player would shout “Bean go!”

Modern bingo is also associated with the name of the American businessman Edwin Lowe. When his company went broke selling toys during the financial crisis of 1928, the young man had the great idea to open a new business. He got a shop where people started playing bingo, using disks with numbers. Edwin Lowe himself spent night after night over the game. Following the unexpected success, Lowe organized the first big game of bingo in New York in the year 1930. He changed the rules a bit making the game more fun. A professor of mathematics at Columbia University – Carl Löffler – was asked to give the entrepreneur a hand, for creating unique card number combinations which would not coincide. Löffler made the 6000 cards with non-repeating numbers, but the work was so hard that the professor lost his mind.

The game quickly gained popularity and today it is one of the most popular games throughout the world. The rules are simple and clear. Generally regarded as a social game, Bingo involves communication between the players. Previously, it was largely women’s game of elderly and middle-aged, but nowadays online bingo is changing this. The game is now played by lot of young people, and the percentage of men is constantly growing. It is not just the accessibility and the fact that the game became much faster and more exciting online, that helps that change in the profile of the average bingo player – the game developers themselves put a lot of effort in carefully crafting their sites and applications to the right target audience – see here for example – the sassy blue-eyed blonde is surely not there to appeal to old ladies…and it is working.

It is working so well that the average bingo player will find themselves in a real pickle when deciding where to best place their trust, time and money. There are hundreds and hundreds sites offering you the world and before you realise you are completely lost in a sea of offers, bonuses and all sort of promises with no clue which way to go. Thankfully there are places online where you can find some useful and trusted information, researched and written by experienced players. I recently got lucky to come by one such, so here we go, I am glad to share with you the best bingo sites by bingoreviews.net.

Now that you are all up to date with your history and I’ve given you a hand through the jungle of online bingo sites, go have some fun…But! Don’t forget to come back soon for more exciting stuff that I am about to dig out for you!