Online Bingo – Its Humble Beginnings

The game of Bingo has been popular worldwide for a great many years, and these days it’s taken flight as an online game which many people enjoy playing in internet Bingo halls. But where did it all begin?

One of the earliest forms of the game was known as Beano, this was most commonly played at fairs and rather than use counters or dabbers to mark cards, the players used beans. Hence the name. Bingo also has connections to an Italian lottery style game called Lo Giuoco which was first played in the early 1500s. The popularity of Lo Giuoco cannot be rivalled; Italians still play it on a weekly basis. And now, from Italy to France. The French version of Lo Giuoco came into existence in 1770, known as Le Lotto, it was a game played mostly by affluent Frenchmen. Germany also had its own Bingo type game but this was most often used as an educational tool – a clever way to make learning spelling and mathematics fun for young pupils.

Around 1930 the game of beano, as mentioned above, was being played in North America. It is purported to have first made its debut at a carnival in Georgia. But the name change from Beano to Bingo came about from a slip of the tongue. Someone called out Bingo instead of Beano and, the rest, as they say, is history. This mistake was overheard by one Edwin S Lowe, a toy salesman from New York. He liked the idea of the game and, with the help of a professor of mathematics, devised a game that incorporated 6,000 individual Bingo cards of the kind that we play with today.

From it’s use as a game and an educational tool Bingo then went on to be used by churches as a means to raise funds. Today the game is played by millions of people all over the world either online in cyber Bingo halls and offline, as always it has been. That’s a triumph considering the game’s humble beginnings as ‘small beans’.