Bingo is a national sport of sorts for us here in the UK, and it has seen a bit of a revival in recent years. Both as a way of having a good night out and also in the massive online bingo market.
As such, there are plenty of interesting facts and figures to entice those who hold bingo close to their hearts, and bingo trivia will undoubtedly come in handy when tackling the local pub quiz.
UK Bingo Trivia Fun Facts
- Fact 1: Bingo was initially called Beano because participants would use beans to mark off their cards. The biro has managed to change all that for the better, and online bingo would be impossible with a bean interface.
- Fact 2: Bingo has its origins in 16th century Italy where the lottery got conceived. This game is still played today in Italy at the weekends, and the Italians spread their idea across the world in the ensuing centuries.
- Fact 3: Though 70% of Bingo players are female, that percentage rises to 80% if you consider the online market on its own.
- Fact 4: Bingo is all about winners, and statistics show that 95% of bingo players have won at least one game in their lives. However, the biggest ever winner of National Bingo took home a whopping £1,167,795.
- Fact 5: A healthy 1.1 billion pounds is staked annually in bingo games in the UK. It is perhaps accounted for because there are over 3 million bingo regulars in the UK alone. This number of players isn’t evenly distributed, with one in five Scottish residents playing regularly than a paltry one in twenty in the South of England.
- Fact 6: A slightly esoteric one this one, Bingo callers have been clocked at an average of 23 numbers a minute, which is just under one number every 3 seconds. As a result, the average bingo game lasts between 3 and 6 minutes.
- Fact 7: Bingo is played by our best and brightest, including celebs like Jade Jagger and Denise Van Outen.
- Fact 8: Though bingo is often considered to be an older person’s game, with the average age of players set at around 47, some stats show 30% of players are now under the age of 30. A new bingo generation is born!
- Fact 9: Though bingo has been used as an educational tool for a while, helping UK kids learn about probability was first used as a teaching aid in Germany in the 19th century.
- Fact 10: Though it’s known as Bingo around the globe, the Australians & New Zealanders, with their penchant for playing with the language, used to call it ‘housie’ during the early 1900s, calling out ‘house’ when they’d got a winning line.
- Fact 11: Take a deep breath for this one. Calculations show that there are around five hundred and fifty-two septillion, four hundred and forty-six sextillion, four hundred and seventy-four quintillion, sixty-one quadrillion, one hundred and twenty-eight trillion, six hundred and forty-eight billion, six hundred and one million, six hundred thousand possible number combos on a bingo card.
- Represented numerically that amount looks like this 552,446,474,061,128,648,601,600,000.
- Fact 12: Average bingo spends range between £15 and £20 a night.
More Interesting UK Bingo Pages