So the other night, I went along to Bingo for the first time in my life.
I consider myself fairly well educated with a solid grounding in the practicalities of life and how people live them. But Bingo is something I’ve never really understood.
I mean, I’ve always known that there’s a caller who reads out numbers, and you mark them off your individual cards. But beyond that, the mechanics have always escaped. It’s a whole part of British culture that’s passed me by.
I suspect that it’s very much a class thing. Although there have always Bingo halls around me, I’ve never known anyone who plays it (or admits to it anyway).
I’m also well aware that it’s very easy to be disparaging about the whole thing, so I’ll try to represent my thoughts on it as fairly as possible.
Once you’ve joined up (it’s a form of gambling, but I think alongside casinos, the compulsory 24 hour cooling off period is now a thing of the past and you can join on the door), you go into an area where you buy your bingo cards. They’re probably not called “Bingo cards” but that’s what I call them.
This area is like a casino in the sense that it’s also filled with fruit machines. Lots of them. But through the main doors is where the action really takes place as you enter an enormous main hall. At the front is a stage from where the main action takes place. The stage also has a large screen behind the caller which details the action and advertises future events.
Laid out in front of this stage are row upon row of seats, largely in formations of twos or fours in pairs facing one another across a table. The tables have built in bingo cards with machines on the side. More about this later.
The atmosphere is one of near silence when a game’s in progress, with intent concentration across the floor as the numbers are called. The numbers come thick and fast, and although a screen on the tables lets you know what numbers are coming, you need to have your wits about you. Any thoughts you may have harboured about bingo players being elderly and slightly dotty are immediately dispelled once you realise the speed with which you have to play the game.
The games are divided up into a complicated (to me) set of sub-games. At the start of the night, you buy books of games, and then settle down to play according to what you’ve bought. There are also additional games that are linked between either the bingo chain you�re playing in, or a National Game across, I assume, every hall in the country. These games have some big prizes, and the game played across the chain (Buzz in Gala terminology) has a radio link-up – which at least means that the numbers are read slightly more slowly since they need time for any of the participating halls to shout if they have a winner.
You mark off your numbers anyway you like, although many like to use American-made bingo dabbers – large felt tips that require minimum wrist action to mark off numbers. Fortuitously they’re available from nearby vending machines. Considering you only need one pen, I was perplexed to notice a gentleman sitting near me with a selection of half a dozen different colours. Maybe he has “lucky” pens.
The main caller was a guy called Michael, who had a bit of charm about him. He knew some of the players by name, and kept asking us if we were having a good time. “No,” was the response on most occasions. Mainly, I guess, because most people don’t win most of the time. At one point in the evening he apologised for the lack of disposable ashtrays that evening. If any of us had one on our table but weren’t using it, could we pass it on to someone who needed one? He suspected that the shortage was due to ashtrays “accidentally falling” into people’s bags.
There are three steps to winning; one line (a horizontal line across one of 6 cards on a sheet), two lines, and a full house (all the numbers). You shout if you win – anything you like. And a checker comes over to read out your serial number. The game all being computer controlled, this information is enough to check whether you’ve got a winning card. If you do, then an attendant goes over to a small desk in the corner and retrieves your winnings, placing them, in cash, into an envelope.
The night I was there, the non-linked games tended to have prizes of around £100 for a line, £200 for two lines, and £400 for a full house. Prize money is really dependent on how many people are playing. This was a Saturday night, so it was quite busy, although the lure of TV finals of X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing may have meant that it was a little quieter than usual. Even the added incentive of a free 2006 diary may not have been enough to prize people away from their televisions.
The clientele were quite interesting, in the sense that it was a largely female, working class crowd. A good proportion of the audience was smoking. Unlike your average place that has smoking and non-smoking areas – the non-smoking area was very much smaller than the rest of the place. And although people sit nominally in groups, they’re quite spread out with little real interaction in the breaks in play.
There’s a bar and “diner” where you can get food, but neither were particularly busy. Many seemed to be nursing a pint the whole evening. This isn’t especially hard to do when you’re so busy checking numbers that you don’t have time to even take a sip of a drink.
There are breaks in play, but the nano-second that the main announcer has gone off stage, the built-in board at your table kicks in to play with a mono-tone woman inviting us to play at a pound a time. Many of those there do this, and seemingly play non-stop for upwards of three hours in total. If you need change for the machine you just stick your hand in the air waving your tenner around and someone will change it for you.
These places are non-stop money-makers with, I would estimate, the average person spending £20 on a (Saturday) evening before food or drinks. The prize money is fair, with something like half the stake being returned as prize money, although you’d probably do better in other forms of gaming if money making is your concern. But I guess that during the day, these places are warm, and let you spend time away from your house.
There are various additional prizes such as tea services and boxes of sweets, but cash is king. At the end of the evening, the manager said hello to the one person in our party who’d won anything, urging us to come back and spend the money. You suspect that the bingo industry is trying hard to encourage a younger demographic to come and play the game, while they fight the twin delights of internet and telephone gambling, and lottery playing. Once upon a time, outside of the bookies, the key gambling opportunities would have been the pools and bingo. Now, we can be playing online poker, laying our own bets on at places like Betfair, and buying scratchcards at the Post Office with our pensions. It’s a tough game to be in.
A genuinely fascinating place to visit.