They can play 10, 20, even 30 cards at a time, stamping away as each number is called, like border guards marking passports.

Most carry compartmentalized plastic boxes that accommodate their equipment for the night-felt-tipped markers (red, blue, green and purple), which they use to mark the numbers on their soft bingo cards. Screech-snap! goes the cellophane tape as they stake out their table tops. The Bugle blends local game times, bingo horoscopes, diet advice, and pictures of smiling winners clutching cash and checks. More than 600,000 copies are published each month and given away at newsstands, bingo parlors, convenience stores and coin laundries. There`s Bingo Bugle, a monthly tabloid newspaper published by franchisees in 41 metropolitan areas. The world`s biggest bingo-supply company is Bingo King, of Denver, Colo., whose revenues have more than doubled in five years. They were caught only after they played the scam so often that other players recalled it happening before.īingo is big business today.

The daughter dropped the duplicate winner on the floor, the mother picked it up and raced down to collect her jackpot. The couple`s daughter ran to the ladies` room, plucked the duplicate card through the window from her father, and ran back to where her mother was crawling happily amid her cards on the floor. She shouted ''Bingo!'' and, in her excitement, spilled her cards on the floor. As soon as the first bingo was registered on the computer, he found the appropriate card and radioed his wife. He fed each number into a portable computer programmed with every possible bingo card. She played the cards and whispered each called number into a two-way radio to her husband outside in a van.

More imaginative was the husband-wife team that bilked thousands of dollars from bingo halls in the Pacific Northwest in 19. But when he tried to collect the $980 jackpot, the manager smelled fresh ink and turned him over to police. There was an enterprising player in 1950 who secreted a small printing press into a game in Danielson, Conn., and used it to run off a winning card.

In basic bingo, the winner is the first person to cover five spaces in a row-up, down or diagonally.īut there are infinite variations, such as arrowhead, Lazy T, pyramid, dogbone, airplane and finally, blackout, in which all spaces on the card must be covered. Bingo cards can be arranged in 32,760 ways, and the odds of winning are about 200 to 1, depending on the number of cards involved in the game. Bingomania centers on a 5-by-5-inch card containing 24 alpha-numeric combinations and one free space.

Nickel bingo card game