Bingo is nearly 500 years old. The game you'd recognise today, with numbered tickets, a caller pulling balls at random, and players racing to complete a pattern, started as an Italian state lottery in 1530 called Il Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia. It travelled north through France as an educational game, reached Britain and Germany in the 19th century, then crossed to America where a toy salesman called Edwin Lowe accidentally gave it the name "bingo" at a Georgia carnival in 1929. Commercial UK bingo only became legal in 1961, after which it exploded into a working-class national pastime. This guide follows the full timeline, from the Venetian lottery clerks who drew the first numbers to Slingo and mobile apps played on the Tube in 2026.
Bizzy has traced every turning point below: the Italian origin, the French educational version used to teach sums to schoolchildren, the wartime US army games, Carl Leffler's famously sanity-destroying mathematics work, Edwin Lowe's accidental naming, the 1960 Act that legalised commercial UK bingo, the Mecca and Gala empires, the 2007 smoking ban that closed hundreds of halls, the rise of online and mobile bingo, and the Slingo hybrid that came out of London in 2015. If you want the short version, the quick facts box has the headline dates; if you want the full story, start at the top.
Bingo at a Glance: The Headline Dates
Before we dig into the full story, here are the milestones every bingo player should know. Each one is a pivot in the game's evolution, from a Venetian tax raiser to a mobile app with a chat room.
Bingo History: Key Dates
1530: The Italian Origin
The earliest known ancestor of bingo is the Italian national lottery Il Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia, which started running every Saturday in 1530. It was organised by the Kingdom of Italy as a way to raise tax revenue, and the game mechanics would be immediately recognisable to a modern bingo player.
Players bought a ticket printed with a grid of numbers. Each week, a clerk pulled wooden tokens out of a bag one at a time, announcing each number as it came out. The first person whose ticket matched a declared winning pattern collected a cash prize. Unlike a modern lottery, where you either win or you don't based on the full draw, the Italian lotto was a race to complete the pattern first, which is the same fundamental mechanic bingo uses today.
The Italian lotto was successful enough that it was still running, barely changed, four hundred years later. It is, in fact, still running: the Italian national lottery still uses 90 numbered balls drawn on a regular schedule, and the format it established became the DNA of every bingo game that followed.
The 1-90 range used in UK 90-ball bingo is a direct inheritance from the 1530 Italian lotto. The original grid covered 1-90, the French adaptation preserved it, and every UK bingo hall since 1961 has used the same ball pool. The 75-ball American format came later and broke from this tradition, but 90-ball is essentially the 500-year-old Italian game with a new name.
1770s: France, Le Lotto, and Classrooms for Children
The game crossed into France in the late 18th century, where it was rebranded as Le Lotto. This is where the ticket design we still use today was born. French printers standardised the ticket into three rows and nine columns, with each row holding five numbers and four blanks. That's exactly the layout a UK 90-ball bingo ticket uses in 2026.
Le Lotto was initially a salon game for the French upper classes, played with tokens, bowls of numbered discs, and fairly high stakes. It became fashionable enough that Napoleon is said to have played it with his generals.
By the early 1800s, a second use for the game had emerged that nobody in Italy had anticipated: French educators started using Le Lotto cards to teach arithmetic, spelling, and history to schoolchildren. Teachers would swap the numbers for letters, multiplication tables, or historical dates, and let the children race to complete rows. This is the root of the number-and-pattern learning activity that still turns up in primary school classrooms all over Europe today.
1800s: Germany, Britain, and the First Bingo-Like Pub Games
Germany adopted the French version of the game in the 19th century, mostly as an educational tool for children. German schools used number-based lotto cards to teach basic maths, and animal-based lotto (pictures of farm animals instead of numbers) to teach vocabulary.
Britain imported the game around the same time, where it took on a quite different character. Rather than staying in classrooms, UK lotto spread through public houses, seaside piers, fairgrounds, and working men's clubs. These pub and fairground versions are where the callers started inventing nicknames for numbers - the beginnings of the "two fat ladies" tradition that survived into modern UK bingo halls. See our bingo calls guide for the full 1-90 list and origins.
There was no single, standardised "bingo" at this point. Every region had its own version: some played lotto with a 90-number pool, some with 80, some with a 75-number American-style grid that had made its way back across the Atlantic. The rules and layouts only started to converge in the 1920s.
1929: Beano, Edwin Lowe, and the Accident That Named Bingo
In December 1929, a New York toy salesman called Edwin S. Lowe was driving back from a buying trip in Florida when he stopped at a travelling carnival outside Jacksonville, Georgia. He was out of work, Christmas was a week away, and he was in a bad mood.
At the carnival, he saw a huge crowd gathered around a stall running a game the locals called "Beano". A caller at the front pulled numbered discs from a coffee can, and players marked them with dried beans on numbered cards. When a player completed a row, they shouted "Beano!" and took a small prize - usually a china doll or a cheap toy. The carnival manager had already tried to close the stall at midnight and couldn't clear the crowd; Lowe watched players refuse to leave, begging for another round.
Lowe was hooked. He went back to New York with a bag of beans and some rubber stamps, and he started running Beano nights for friends in his flat. At one of those evenings, a player who completed her row got so excited she stammered out "B-B-BINGO!" instead of "Beano." Lowe later said he knew immediately that "bingo" was the better name. It was shorter, more cheerful, easier to shout across a hall.
He registered the game as "Bingo" and started selling Bingo sets through his toy company the following year. The name caught on fast, and by 1934 Bingo was being played in an estimated 10,000 games a week across the United States.
1930: Carl Leffler and the 6,000 Cards That Cost a Professor His Sanity
Lowe's early Bingo sets had a problem. Each pack only contained a few dozen distinct ticket designs, which meant that in any room with 40 or 50 players, multiple people would hold identical tickets. When a number was called, several people would shout "Bingo" at exactly the same moment and the game would dissolve into arguments over the prize.
Lowe needed thousands of unique, mathematically non-overlapping tickets. He hired Carl Leffler, a mathematics professor at Columbia University in New York, to design them. Leffler's task was to produce 6,000 different 75-ball bingo cards, each with a unique combination of numbers distributed according to the column rules (B 1-15, I 16-30, N 31-45, G 46-60, O 61-75).
This is a harder problem than it sounds. With 25 squares per card and the column restrictions, designing thousands of truly unique combinations that also feel "balanced" to the player (no card that's obviously rigged to win early, no card that's impossible to hit) is a serious combinatorial puzzle. Leffler reportedly worked on it obsessively for months.
The story goes that by the time he finished, Leffler had "gone mad" from the effort. Whether that's literally true or bingo-hall folklore, the 6,000 cards he produced were the foundation of every commercial bingo set sold in America for the next decade. Leffler was paid per card, which may or may not have been a bargain depending on how you feel about your own sanity.
Modern online bingo sites no longer use Leffler's cards - they use certified random number generators to produce unique tickets on demand. But the mathematical principle Leffler established (that every card must be different and statistically balanced) is now a UKGC licensing requirement. Every UK bingo platform's RNG is tested by independent labs like eCOGRA, and the standard those labs use descends directly from the fairness problem Leffler solved in 1930.
1930s-1950s: Bingo in American Churches and British Fairgrounds
Bingo's first big post-1929 growth market in America was churches. A Catholic priest in Pennsylvania approached Lowe in 1934 asking whether bingo could be used for fundraising; the parish was struggling, and he thought the game might fill the hall. Lowe agreed and within a year bingo was running in hundreds of parish halls, raising money for church roofs, heating, and schools. By 1940, the American Catholic Church was one of the largest users of bingo in the world.
In Britain, bingo took a different path. It couldn't be played commercially for cash prizes - the Gaming Act 1845 had outlawed most forms of public gambling - but it did run at fairgrounds, seaside piers, and church fetes, usually as a "prize" game where winners got a china ornament or a tin of biscuits rather than money. The British caller tradition with its nicknames, rhymes, and crowd responses ("wobble wobble!" for 88, "cough cough" for 9) developed in these informal settings.
During the Second World War, bingo spread further through British and American army camps, where soldiers played it obsessively in barracks and NAAFI canteens. By 1945, an entire generation of returning servicemen and women had played thousands of games, which is part of why the UK was ready to embrace commercial bingo the moment the law changed.
1 January 1961: The Act That Built Mecca Bingo
The Betting and Gaming Act 1960 is the single most important moment in UK bingo history. Passed by Parliament on 1 September 1960 and brought into force on 1 January 1961, it legalised commercial bingo halls for the first time. Large cash prizes were now allowed, provided the bingo hall was set up as a members-only club (a quirk that survived into the 1990s).
The first mover was Eric Morley, a West End impresario who already ran Britain's largest chain of dance halls through the Mecca Leisure Group. Morley had been watching his ballrooms empty out as young people switched from dance nights to television in the late 1950s. The 1960 Act was his lifeline: he could now run commercial bingo in the same buildings.
Morley introduced bingo into 60 Mecca dance halls in 1961, including the Lyceum Ballroom in London. The first dedicated Mecca Bingo hall opened at Rosehill in Surrey, converted from the old Gaumont Carshalton cinema. It was a colossal success. Within two years, Mecca had dozens of bingo halls trading under its name, and the Rank Organisation, British Home Stores, and several cinema chains were all converting failing venues into bingo clubs.
The second major operator was the predecessor of Gala Bingo. Alpha Bingo Clubs (ABC) formed in 1961, was bought by Star in 1970 (becoming Coral Social Clubs), then merged with Granada's bingo operation in 1991 to form the Gala brand. By the mid-1990s, Mecca and Gala were the two dominant operators in the UK bingo hall sector, a duopoly that lasted nearly 30 years.
1960s-1970s: The UK Bingo Hall Boom
The 1960s and 70s were the golden age of the British bingo hall. Every town of any size had at least one, and the bigger cities had a dozen. At its peak in the mid-1970s, an estimated 12 million British adults were regular bingo players - roughly one in four of the adult population.
Most halls were converted cinemas (the rise of television had emptied British cinemas from about 1955 onwards) or old dance halls. The typical venue seated between 500 and 2,000 players, with the caller on a raised stage, a mechanical ball blower at the front, and rows of long bench tables running back to the walls. Tickets were sold at the door, paid for in cash, and games ran for three or four hours with intervals for bar service and food.
Bingo was predominantly played by women in this era - the figure often quoted is around 80% female. It was affordable entertainment, a night out without needing a male escort (a fairly radical idea in early 1960s Britain), and it gave working-class women a social venue of their own. The halls ran coach trips, birthday specials, and summer excursions to Blackpool, and many players went to the same hall every week for decades.
The traditional bingo calls (two fat ladies, legs eleven, Kelly's eye, clickety click) all stabilised in this period. They weren't invented by any single person; they emerged organically from callers in different halls copying, competing with, and outdoing each other. By 1975, the list was more or less fixed. See our full bingo calls guide for the 1-90 set.
1980s-1990s: Consolidation and Jackpot Networks
The 1980s brought the first wave of consolidation. Smaller independent halls couldn't compete with the Mecca and Gala chains, and dozens closed each year. The survivors started linking up: the National Bingo Game, launched in 1986, let multiple halls share a single jackpot. A player at a Mecca hall in Newcastle could, in theory, win a prize funded by a pound coin dropped into a meter by a player at a Gala hall in Bristol.
The 1990s brought digital equipment, electronic dabbers (small handheld screens that replaced paper tickets), and the first machine-calling systems, which ran alongside the traditional human caller for years before taking over. The National Bingo Game's jackpot grew into seven figures.
But the game was also starting to drift demographically. Younger people weren't replacing the older players who'd started going in the 1960s. The average hall age crept up every year. By 1999, the warning signs were clear: bingo was running on the loyalty of an ageing generation, and no new audience was arriving.
1996: Bingo Goes Online
The first online bingo site, Bingo Zone, launched in the United States in 1996. It was a free-to-play site that didn't take deposits; players got in by registering their details, and the site made money selling advertising against its audience. The graphics were rudimentary, the rooms tiny, and the prizes were token (typically a few dollars), but the concept worked.
By 2000 there were around 20 online bingo sites, most of them free-play or low-stakes. The first real-money UK online bingo site of any scale was Foxy Bingo, which launched in 2005, followed rapidly by tombola (which moved from bookshop-lottery operation to online bingo in 2006), Sun Bingo (2006), and Mecca Bingo Online (2007). The two big bingo hall operators had finally woken up.
Online bingo grew fast because it did everything hall bingo couldn't. Games ran every few minutes rather than every 15. Players could play from home without the travel, the weather, or the smoke. Chat rooms let people socialise with the regulars at 11pm on a Tuesday when no hall would ever be open. Tickets cost pence rather than pounds. By 2010, the UK online bingo market was worth over £500 million a year and growing.
1 July 2007: The Smoking Ban
The single biggest blow to UK bingo halls was the smoking ban, which came into force in England on 1 July 2007 (Wales and Northern Ireland had banned indoor smoking slightly earlier). At the time, an estimated 63% of UK bingo hall players were smokers, compared to around 21% of the general adult population.
Overnight, players could no longer smoke at their table. Mid-game breaks outside got complicated by queues, weather, and the fact that the callers couldn't pause indefinitely. Most halls responded with outdoor smoking shelters, but the flow of a bingo night, which had always involved sitting with a pint, a cigarette, and a dauber, was broken.
Attendance dropped sharply in the 18 months after July 2007. Rank Group (Mecca's parent) announced in late 2007 that nine of its halls would close. Gala closed another dozen across 2008. Smaller independent halls failed at the rate of roughly two per month for the next five years. The UK had approximately 635 bingo halls in 2007; by 2014 that figure was below 400; by 2023 it was around 260.
No, but it was the accelerant. The 2007 ban coincided with the rise of online bingo (much cheaper and more convenient) and the growth of home streaming services (Sky Plus, then Netflix from 2012, which competed for the same evening-out-at-home audience). The smoking ban tipped the balance from decline to collapse, but the decline was already under way.
2010s: Mobile Bingo, Apps, and a New Generation of Players
The 2010s saw online bingo shift to mobile. Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010; by 2012 most UK online bingo sites had a mobile-optimised site, and by 2014 most had a dedicated iOS and Android app. Between 2013 and 2014 alone, UK mobile bingo usage grew by around 22%.
Mobile changed who played. Hall bingo had always been predominantly played by women over 50. Mobile bingo attracted a much broader age range, with significant growth among players aged 25 to 40 who'd never set foot in a hall. The chat-room culture, the lower ticket prices, and the ability to play on a commute, at a bus stop, or during an ad break on television, made it viable for people whose parents would never have called themselves bingo players.
This is the demographic that still sustains the UK online bingo market. The halls continue to serve older, loyal players; mobile serves everyone else.
2015: Slingo Goes Real-Money
Slingo is a hybrid game that combines bingo with slot machine mechanics. It was invented in 1994 by Sal Falciglia and launched on AOL as a free-to-play game, where it was enormously popular (at its peak it had millions of monthly players on the early internet).
Slingo stayed casual for two decades. The real-money version took off in July 2015, when London-based Gaming Realms plc bought the Slingo intellectual property from RealNetworks for $18 million and launched a regulated UK real-money studio called Slingo Originals. The first Slingo Originals real-money title, Slingo Riches, launched on regulated UK bingo and casino sites later that year.
Since 2015, Slingo Originals has released over 50 titles including Slingo Rainbow Riches, Slingo Deal or No Deal, Slingo Starburst and Slingo Fluffy Favourites. Slingo now sits on nearly every major UK bingo site's games menu alongside 90-ball, 75-ball and slots. It's the first truly new format to achieve mass adoption in the British bingo sector since the online transition itself.
2020-2026: Pandemic, Price Shocks, and the Current Landscape
The Covid pandemic closed every UK bingo hall from March 2020 to June 2020 and again for long stretches through 2021. An estimated 55 UK halls closed permanently as a direct result of the pandemic closures and the loss of revenue across 2020-21. Online bingo, in contrast, grew by around 35% across the same period as locked-down players turned to their phones.
The 2022-2023 energy crisis added another squeeze. Running costs for large high-street halls with big spaces, long opening hours, and heating and lighting needs spiralled. Approximately 20 more halls closed between 2022 and 2024 citing energy prices directly.
As of 2026, the UK has around 250 live bingo halls, down from 635 in 2007. Mecca Bingo and Buzz Bingo (the 2020 rebrand of Gala Bingo's hall estate after the Stars Group split) remain the two dominant operators. Buzz is the largest by venue count (around 90), Mecca runs approximately 80 venues, and around 80 independents account for the rest.
Online and mobile bingo continue to grow. The UK Gambling Commission estimates the online bingo sector is now worth around £190 million a year in gross gambling yield, and mobile makes up roughly 70% of that. In January 2026, the UKGC introduced a 10x wagering cap on all bingo bonuses, which has standardised welcome offer terms across every UK-licensed bingo site. The cap is one of the biggest regulatory changes to UK bingo since the 2005 Gambling Act. For an overview of what current sites look like now, see our new bingo sites list.
The Full Bingo Timeline
The entire history of bingo, from Venice to 2026, in one table:
| Year | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 1530 | Il Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia launches as state lottery | Italy |
| 1770s | Game spreads as "Le Lotto"; 3x9 ticket layout standardised | France |
| Early 1800s | Le Lotto adapted as educational game for schoolchildren | France, Germany |
| 1800s | Game reaches Britain, played at fairgrounds and in pubs | UK |
| 1929 | Edwin Lowe sees "Beano" at Georgia carnival, names it Bingo | USA |
| 1930 | Carl Leffler designs 6,000 unique 75-ball cards | Columbia University, USA |
| 1934 | Bingo estimated at 10,000 games per week across USA | USA |
| 1940s | Bingo spreads through Allied army camps in WWII | USA, UK, Europe |
| 1 Jan 1961 | Betting and Gaming Act 1960 takes effect, legalising commercial bingo | UK |
| 1961 | Eric Morley opens first Mecca Bingo hall at Rosehill, Surrey | UK |
| 1961 | Alpha Bingo Clubs (ABC) forms, later becomes Gala | UK |
| Mid-1970s | Estimated 12 million UK adults play bingo regularly | UK |
| 1986 | National Bingo Game launches, linking halls into shared jackpots | UK |
| 1991 | Gala Bingo brand created from Coral/Granada merger | UK |
| 1994 | Slingo invented by Sal Falciglia, launches on AOL | USA |
| 1996 | Bingo Zone launches as first online bingo site | USA |
| 2005 | Foxy Bingo launches; peak UK bingo hall count (~635) | UK |
| 2006-07 | tombola, Sun Bingo, Mecca Online launch | UK |
| 1 July 2007 | English smoking ban comes into force | UK |
| 2007-09 | Rank and Gala close dozens of halls | UK |
| 2010 | iPad launches, accelerating mobile bingo | Global |
| 2012-14 | Most UK bingo sites release mobile apps | UK |
| 2015 | Gaming Realms buys Slingo for $18m, launches Slingo Originals studio | UK |
| 2020-21 | Pandemic closes all UK bingo halls intermittently; 55 close permanently | UK |
| 2022-24 | Energy crisis closes a further 20 halls | UK |
| 19 Jan 2026 | UKGC 10x wagering cap on bonuses takes effect | UK |
| 2026 | Around 250 UK bingo halls remain; mobile ~70% of online market | UK |
Why UK Bingo Survived When Most of Its Halls Didn't
Bingo's history is not a simple decline story. The halls are in sharp retreat, but the game itself has probably never been played by more people. The switch from physical halls to online and mobile means the the UK bingo-playing audience today is larger than it has been at any point since the 1970s, even though the physical infrastructure has shrunk by 60%.
Three things kept the game alive:
- The chat-room culture that online operators built in the 2000s. Players didn't want to play alone; they wanted the hall social atmosphere without leaving the sofa. Chat hosts, room regulars and chat games filled that gap.
- Mobile. The iPhone and iPad made bingo truly portable for the first time. You could play a 90-ball game while waiting for the kettle to boil. That reach was impossible before 2010.
- Format variety. 90-ball, 75-ball, 80-ball, 30-ball speed bingo, 5-line Swedish bingo, and Slingo now sit side by side on every major UK site. Players who'd got bored of one format could switch to another without leaving the site. See our guides to 90-ball bingo, 75-ball bingo and 5-line bingo for the full rules of each format.
Bingo has reinvented itself more times than almost any other gambling format. From a Venetian lottery ticket to a carnival stall to a working men's club to a mobile app, it has kept finding new audiences every time the old ones started to fade. At nearly 500 years old, it's probably the longest-running game of chance in continuous public play anywhere in the world.
Where Bingo Goes Next
Two trends are shaping UK bingo in the second half of the 2020s. First, tighter regulation: the UKGC 10x wagering cap from January 2026 is the biggest structural change to UK bingo bonuses in twenty years, and further affordability checks and advertising rules are expected to follow. Second, continued format innovation: Slingo Originals and its rivals are releasing more hybrid bingo-slot titles every year, and streaming bingo (live-hosted games on Twitch-style platforms) has started to emerge as a format for under-30s.
The physical halls will probably stabilise at around 200-230 venues by 2030 - enough for a core of loyal, mostly older players but no longer the mass-market format they were in 1975. The real growth is on mobile, and the real innovation is happening on the studios developing new variants. For anyone starting out, our how to play bingo hub covers every format, and our bingo caller tool lets you run your own game at home in the traditional style.
Bingo started in 1530 when a Venetian clerk pulled a wooden disc out of a bag and called a number. Five hundred years later, a certified random number generator in a data centre pulls a virtual ball and an iPhone shows it on screen. The technology has changed beyond recognition. The game, remarkably, has not.
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Where did bingo come from?
Bingo started in Italy in 1530 as a state lottery called Il Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia. It ran every Saturday with players buying tickets printed with numbers and winning cash prizes when their ticket matched a drawn pattern. That same Italian lottery is still running today. The game then spread to France in the 1770s as Le Lotto, to Germany and Britain in the 1800s, and to the USA in 1929, where toy salesman Edwin Lowe gave it the name bingo.
Who invented bingo?
Bingo as a modern branded game was launched by Edwin S. Lowe, a New York toy salesman, in 1929. Lowe saw a carnival game called Beano in Georgia, watched players refuse to leave the stall, and realised there was a commercial opportunity. He renamed it bingo after a player accidentally shouted the wrong word, registered it, and started selling sets the following year. The underlying game is much older - the first version was the Italian state lottery of 1530 - but Lowe gave it the modern name and commercial form.
Who was Carl Leffler and what did he do for bingo?
Carl Leffler was a mathematics professor at Columbia University in New York. In 1930, Edwin Lowe hired him to design 6,000 unique 75-ball bingo cards, each with a different combination of numbers. This was needed to solve a problem where multiple players at the same hall kept winning on identical cards. Leffler reportedly worked on the puzzle obsessively for months and was said to have gone mad from the effort. His 6,000 cards became the foundation of every commercial bingo set sold in America for the next decade and established the fairness principles that every UK bingo RNG still follows today.
When did bingo become legal in the UK?
Commercial cash-prize bingo became legal in the UK on 1 January 1961, when the Betting and Gaming Act 1960 came into force. Before that, bingo could only be played at fairgrounds, church fetes and seaside piers for token prizes (china ornaments, tins of biscuits) rather than cash. The 1961 change triggered an immediate boom - Mecca Bingo launched within weeks, followed by Alpha Bingo Clubs (later Gala) the same year.
When did the first bingo hall open in the UK?
Eric Morley's Mecca Leisure Group opened the first dedicated Mecca Bingo hall at Rosehill in Surrey in 1961, converted from the old Gaumont Carshalton cinema. Mecca had introduced bingo into 60 of its dance halls the same year, including the Lyceum Ballroom in London, as a way to fill venues that were emptying out as young people switched to television. By the mid-1970s, around 12 million British adults were regular bingo players, and every town had at least one dedicated hall.
Why did so many UK bingo halls close?
The 2007 smoking ban was the biggest single blow - roughly 63% of UK bingo hall players smoked, and being forced outside broke the flow of a bingo night. Rank (Mecca's parent) and Gala closed dozens of halls in the 18 months after the ban. Other factors were the rise of online and mobile bingo (which was cheaper and more convenient), the growth of home streaming services from the 2010s onwards, Covid-era closures (around 55 halls closed permanently in 2020-21), and the 2022-24 energy crisis (around 20 more closures). The UK went from around 635 halls in 2007 to approximately 250 by 2026.
When did online bingo start?
The first online bingo site was Bingo Zone, launched in the USA in 1996. It was free to play and made money through advertising. The first real-money UK online bingo site of scale was Foxy Bingo in 2005, followed by tombola (2006), Sun Bingo (2006) and Mecca Bingo Online (2007). By 2000 there were around 20 online bingo sites; by 2010 the UK online bingo market was worth over £500 million a year.
When did mobile bingo take off?
Mobile bingo grew with smartphone adoption. Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, and by 2012 most UK online bingo sites had a mobile-optimised site. By 2014 most had dedicated iOS and Android apps. UK mobile bingo usage grew around 22% between 2013 and 2014. Mobile is now roughly 70% of the UK online bingo market and has brought in a much younger audience than hall bingo ever reached.
What is Slingo and when did it start?
Slingo is a hybrid game that combines bingo with slot machine mechanics. It was invented in 1994 by Sal Falciglia and launched as a free game on AOL, where it attracted millions of players on the early internet. The real-money version took off in July 2015, when London-based Gaming Realms plc bought the Slingo intellectual property from RealNetworks for $18 million and launched the Slingo Originals studio. The first real-money title, Slingo Riches, launched on regulated UK bingo sites later in 2015. Slingo Originals has since released over 50 titles and Slingo now sits on every major UK bingo site.
How old is bingo?
Bingo is nearly 500 years old. The first recorded version was the Italian state lottery Il Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia, which started in 1530. It's probably the longest-running game of chance in continuous public play anywhere in the world. The name bingo itself is only about 100 years old - it was coined by Edwin Lowe in December 1929 when a player at one of his Beano nights in New York accidentally shouted 'B-B-BINGO!' instead of 'Beano' after completing a line.
How did bingo get its name?
The name came from an accident. In late 1929, New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe was running demonstration games of the carnival game Beano at his flat. One player, so excited to complete her row, stammered out 'B-B-BINGO!' instead of Beano. Lowe thought it was a better name - shorter, more cheerful, easier to shout across a hall - and registered the game as bingo the following year. The Italian original had been called Il Giuoco del Lotto, the French version Le Lotto, and the American carnival version Beano; bingo only became the standard name from 1930 onwards.
Who popularised bingo in the UK?
Eric Morley, a West End impresario who ran the Mecca Leisure Group. Morley's dance halls were emptying out in the late 1950s as young people switched to television, and the Betting and Gaming Act 1960 gave him a way to keep them in business. He introduced bingo into 60 Mecca ballrooms on day one of legalisation (1 January 1961), opened the first dedicated Mecca Bingo hall at Rosehill later that year, and is credited with popularising commercial bingo in Britain. Morley was also the founder of the Miss World pageant, which ran from his ballrooms before going global.