Eyes down
Although there is very little skill involved, Bingo can become addictive
Bingo is a game of pure chance, where randomly selected numbers are drawn, and players match these numbers on cards which conform to a special grid. Each card has its own unique selection of numbers. The first person to have a card where the drawn numbers match those on all or part of his card will call out ‘Bingo’ or ‘House’ to show they are the winner of that specific game. The only element of skill required is the ability to swiftly search one’s card for the called numbers before the next one is called.
Over 2,000 years ago an innovative Chinese gentleman called Cheung Leung was the first person to actually use a form of bingo to generate cash, and the money generated from games went to help build the Great Wall of China.
It took American toy salesman Ed Lowe to fully develop the game into what we now recognise as proper Bingo. Lowe, realising the limitations of the sheer numbers game, in 1930 commissioned Carl Lieffler, a Columbia University professor of mathematics, to come up with over 6,000 different permutations of each bingo card. Sadly the pressure was too much for the professor and he ended his days in a mental institution, no doubt reduced to muttering ‘legs eleven’ and ‘key of the door’ to anyone who would care to listen.
The legacy left by Lieffler and Lowe is however truly mind boggling when you look at the staggering statistics generated by this game – today, more than $90 million are spent on Bingo in the US every week.
If there are six billion people in the world today that means there are 92,0557,412,343,521,400 cards for each person on the planet and, if you could print one million cards per second it would still take 17,505,972,382,599 and seven years to print every possible Bingo card and, calculating the number of possible combinations yields a result that there exists 5,524,464,557,061,129,000,000,000, of which 4,976,6400,000 would have the same 24 numbers but, in a totally different arrangement – no wonder the esteemed professor went bonkers.
No-one however is going to compare the playing of Bingo to say the skill needed to play Poker, Bridge, or Chess; it’s a game that is considered to have all the intellectual requirement of a plank of MDF, yet it still draws the punters in and, here in Paphos Thursday night for the 200 plus regular patrons its always a night with a vengeance.
The surprising thing for me was the range of age groups present, I assumed (wrongly) that Bingo was solely the province of middle aged, impressively tanned housewives who look as if they enjoy a quart or two of baileys before lunch, or, lured-in-their-droves grandmothers with leathery skin, clouds of white hair, and blue eye-shadow.
But no, it was a really mixed bag, cool teenagers, smart twenty somethings right up to seventy plus all had their ‘eyes down’ last Thursday evening.
A large, middle-aged lady with watermelon sized earrings sat opposite me, she proceeded to check off with her dabber (the special pen used to mark off the called numbers) on what seemed like an entire legion of bingo cards, fingers flying, earrings swinging like chandeliers, rapidly scanning, then murdering each number with her pen. This was indeed a talent at work and surely, is a testament to the curative powers of the game in that she will no doubt ward off Alzheimer’s disease if she continues to weekly work her hand-eye co-ordination skill in such a dedicated manner.
The person key to the entire proceedings is the slightly dominatrix Bingo caller, a forty something lady reminiscent of a school gym mistress. Seriously, you don’t want to mess with this lady – no whispering in corners, no mobile phones or a severe verbal reprimand is issued. And God forbid anyone dares mess up her proceedings by suddenly yelling ‘Bingo’ when in fact you are utterly Bingoless (Warning, do this and you are also shunned by your fellow players).
Our dominatrix will start by tantalisingly holding the numbers in her mouth, and, as she draws them languidly over her tongue, this is the vocal equivalent of a war drum, and is answered immediately by the bingo warriors who all uncoil like springs and with dabbers poised go instantly into combat, stabbing ruthlessly onto their innocent bingo cards.
By game three my head is swirling, my hands are cramping up, and my teeth hurt, I start to think there has to be some hallucinogenic substance impregnated into each dabber as the need to keep stabbing away is fast becoming addictive.
The tension rises, we are one number short of a full house then, from across the hall BINGO is called …..Agh! And, just as I was waiting with heightened expectancy for the number 22 (two little, ducks quack, quack) a man clad in a dubious Hawaiian shirt festooned with dogs heads, smugly held aloft his card.
There’s complete silence as the checker descends on his table and duly confirms with a thumbs up sign that we have a winner, then, it’s the sound of a few discreet curses followed by the en-mass crumpling of hundreds of bingo sheets.
You can win anything from ten, fifty, one hundred plus pounds and, if there is a roll over to the next week the jackpot game could rise to as much as £1,000.
It’s a game for those who have little else to do with their time and enjoy a wee bit of a gamble, but, I am strangely attracted to one of the many versions of the game – one in particular I feel would go down very well here in Paphos and that’s the version called ‘Chicken Shit Bingo’. The game is exceedingly simple, you get one chicken, cover a large painted board with numbers, spread this with juicy chicken feed , the bird then starts eating, money changes hands and the object of the game is to pick the number on which the first daub of chicken poo lands. I know, I really must get out more.
Bingo numbers
1 Kelly’s eye
2 One little duck (quack quack)
8 One fat lady, one little wobble (wobble wobble)
10 Cock and hen
11 Legs eleven
13 Unlucky for some
16 Sweet sixteen
19 Goodbye teens
21 Key of the door
22 Two little ducks (quack quack)
31 Brandy Time
40 Life begins at
41 Life’s begun
44 Droopy drawers
50 Half a century
57 Heinz varieties
59 Brighton line (choo choo)
65 Retirement age
66 Clickety click
69 Either way up
77 Sunset strip
88 Two fat ladies (wobble wobble)
89 Nearly there, All but one
90 Top of the shop
