The Best Strategies for Online Bingo People might tend to think of bingo as a game of pure luck and chance. That your only hopes of winning are ultimately up to the fates that day, and whether you can get lucky. While fortune certainly will need to be on your side to give you a good chance of winning, it’s actually far from the case that it isn’t possible to be a better bingo player.
There are lots of ways to improve your game and give yourself a better chance of winning, and indeed strategies to maximise your winnings. Whether you’re a brand new player or a seasoned veteran, we think there will be useful strategies for you in here.
- Practice
While not, as such, a strategy for playing, for my money, the single most important thing you can do is practice. Play as many games as you can—even training on free to play games, if you don’t want to risk the money every time. Bingo, for new players, is almost always much faster paced than you might imagine. It can be difficult to keep up, especially for new players.
So, one of the most important things you can do to play bingo well is get used to this—part of your strategy needs to be being able to quickly mark your numbers, and the only real way you can do this is by playing lots of games.
Now, let’s look at how to actually strategize during the game.
- Smaller games
Bigger games are always the most tempting draw, since they tend to have the biggest prize pools. They can certainly be great fun to play, with that added tension. The fact is, though, the more people in the game, the less chance you have of winning at bingo. Someone is much more likely to call house before you if there are lots of people in the game.
Playing smaller games, while you won’t win such big prizes, gives you a greater chance of winning in the first place. Playing lots of smaller games, which will tend to have lower entry fees to begin with, gives you a greater chance of making lots of smaller winnings.
In any gambling, giving yourself a mathematically higher chance of winning is, naturally, one of the best strategies. This is particularly true of bingo, since the large games can contain literally hundreds of people.
Estimates suggest that around 3.5 million people across the country play online bingo. The most popular sites are Bet365, Bingo All Stars, and Chit Chat Bingo. While there may be valuable games to play on these sites, avoiding them for smaller ones could be more to your advantage.
- Use several cards
For those who have been playing for a long time, one of the best strategies for maximising your wins is using multiple cards. This can make it significantly harder to keep track of what numbers you have marked and where, but once you can get used to doing that, using multiple cards rather than just one gives you a much higher chance of winning.
Naturally, you’ll typically have to pay a higher entry fee to get multiple cards, but with even just one extra card, your chances of winning are doubled. With two, they’re tripled.
Learn to quickly scan the cards available and pick a few of the best ones. Again, this will be a learning curve, but it’s a really important one if you want to play the game strategically.
- Probability theory
There’s obviously a lot of numbers involved in bingo, so many over the years have attempted to deconstruct the game into a unified theory, giving you the best mathematical advantage when you play.
While there is, obviously, no absolute way to win every time, one theory suggests that in a longer game, the numbers will tend to gravitate towards the median of number 45. Numbers called will tend to be closer to this median. Shorter games will have the opposite effect, giving numbers closer to the edges of 1 and 99. This is known as Tippett’s theory.
Alternatively, Granville’s theory simply suggests that a wider distribution of numbers is more advantageous—high and low, 0-9, odd and even, etc.
Again, these strategies will not work every time, but incorporating some idea of probability theory into your strategy when selecting a card could certainly be a big help.
- Budget
The key to winning frequently at bingo is being able to play as many games as you can. For online bingo, the temptation can be to play the largest game and attempt to win the largest prize. On the other hand, you may burn through your budget too quickly on lots of short games.
The point is that you need to be able to choose your battles wisely. If you blow all of your budget too quickly, you may not be able to get into the most advantageous games.
Play slowly and methodically, finding the right games—and, most importantly, set yourself a strict budget. You can pick the games more wisely, and you won’t run out of money too soon and have to end the night early.
This will give you the best chance to play the best range of games, which is always the best way of maximising your winnings. There’s a lot you can do to help yourself along in terms of using extra cards and practicing, but the simple fact is that you need to be able to get in on as many games as you can.
In the end, then, strategy married with a bit of luck is how you’re going to win big at bingo. Don’t get discouraged if you can’t catch a break. Think about your strategy, what’s working and what isn’t, and change it up. Sometimes, all it can take is the simplest alteration to the way you play for the wins to start rolling in.
