Bingo, or “Housey-Housey” as it was originally known. Became massively popular in the UK from the 1960s, with “Bingo Halls” opening up and down the country year on year until after the millennium when popularity started to wane.

Bingo is a game of chance and probability where players are typically armed with a ticket card with 6 games printed on it. Each game space is an arrangement of 9 columns and 3 rows containing 15 numbers where the numbers can be anywhere between 1 and 90, or 1 to 75 if playing the American, US version of the game.

Column 1 contains numbers 1 to 9 (or 10), column 2 contains numbers 10 to 19 (or 11 to 20), column 3 contains numbers 20 to 29 (or 21 to 30) and so on up to the last column which will therefore contact numbered from 80 or 81 to 91. Game tickets are arranged in groups of 6 games as this will allow every number between 1 and 90 to appear across all size games. This means that if a player has opted to buy into all 6 games, they are guaranteed to strike off a number each time one is called.

Numbers are called by caller at random, usually after announcing “eyes down” to signal the start of play. Balls can be either electronically generated at random or drawn from a bingo machine – kind of like a large rotating hamster wheel full of numbered bingo balls that are pulled (called) one by one, at random.