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Online Bingo History

December 13, 2008  /  admin  /   Comments Off

Bingo is one of those games with a very long and complex past that is murky even to the best historians, but the fact is it finally came into the form that we know it as today in 1929 in New York City thanks to a traveling salesman who converted a carnival game he had seen into what we now call bingo. From those days it would be several more decades until the arrival of the internet, but those decades proved that bingo could be popular with a mass audience in both the United States and the United Kingdom where bingo really took hold and turned into something of a real national tradition for both countries. School children learned bingo as a way to identify their numbers and this meant that nearly everyone already knew how to play bingo by the time they were adults. This, along with the fact that so many church groups and other social organizations used bingo as a way to raise money for various social causes meant that a huge number of people were more than familiar with the game. Because of this, by the time it started being offered on the web in the mid 1990’s, everyone knew how to play and the game was simple enough to grasp that even if they did not, it was a cinch to learn. That meant that bingo online took off far faster than anyone could have predicted, predating even the casinos on the web which are so popular today.

The earliest bingo web sites were very basic and did not offer much in the way of sound or graphics, but as the web developed, so did the bingo sites. The Adobe Flash plugin would change everything by allowing bingo providers to add animation and sounds to their games and really increase the fun factor. This and the fact that bingo is a very social game that worked out perfectly with the ability to chat online meant that bingo had a very strong future that would lead it to become one of the biggest online wagering games on the planet in less than a decade. New features were added to the software so that when numbers were called the computer would automatically check them off from players’ cards meant that bingo got even easier to play and those involved could focus more time on chatting – a huge plus for many bingo players. Since it was such huge business, bingo sites cropped up all over the world until today there are hundreds of gaming sites that one can play bingo in. The e-wallet system made things very easy for those who wanted to buy cards and collect their winnings so it was a very short time until bingo reached the billion dollar a year mark and it only seems to continue growing as the years go by. Experts predict that as the increasingly younger female market continues to propel the growth of online bingo there will be an even bigger surge in the coming decades and that the economy of bingo on the web can’t help but flourish.