The online bingo is a game played on Internet. In the web business fraternity, online bingo is considered as the multi-million dollar business. The websites that provides the facility to play online bingo use a random number generator. The actual online bingo resembles to that of online poker or online casino in terms of the way it has been played online, with everything being virtual. The most remarkable feature of online bingo is the chat functionality provided by some websites. Only those bingo websites are successful who creates sense of community and interaction between players.

How to play online bingo

With the advent of the online bingo (Courtesy – Internet), it is becoming the greatest entertainer for the bingo lovers. It is the easiest of the games to play and the online version is not the exception.  Even while playing bingo online, players can make use of the features like Auto-daub which is used to automatically mark off the numbers on cards as they are called and the players don’t have to mark it off, this makes the game even more exciting and interesting to play. Many of the software providers add a tint by supporting other gaming features like "Best Card Sorting" and "Best Card Highlighting" to sort and highlight the player’s cards by closest to complete bingo. These additional features serve the purpose of providing a sense of enjoyment to the bingo player.

In land-based or offline bingo where talking is strictly prohibited, the online bingo has taken care of this aspect and revolutionize the game by inventing the chat application that brings a different dimension to the gaming. So even while playing the game the players can meet online and have a chat conversation. This feature has tremendous retention capacity aimed especially at the female audience.

Using this feature to its full potential, it is customary for players to congratulate the winners with comments like “WTG” or “Way To Go”. Much on the same line as instant messaging, online bingo chat rooms make use of their acronyms or shortcuts to get rid of typing the repeated sentences.

A 90-ball bingo is played in UK, some parts of Europe, Australia and parts of South America against a 75-ball bingo, which is usually played in North America using a card with 5x5 matrix with the center square being marked free, whereas in case of 90-ball game, the card is divided into 9x3 matrix.  90-ball bingo is played in 3 stages i.e. “One line” stage where the player or the participant has to mark off a complete horizontal line across one card (completing a row of 5 numbers), “Two line” stage where the player completes any two lines marked off horizontally across a card (10 numbers to be marked) and lastly “Full House” stage means all the 15 numbers have to be marked off in a card. The prize value differs for all the 3 stages with the largest prize for full house bingo.

Online bingo has become the integral part of life for the people in UK and Europe especially for the women’s between the age group of 20-30 years; it has become the most popular entertainment and leisure activity. The UK market has shown upward trend with big brand names already joining the bandwagon of online bingo business by launching bingo games on their already established websites. The most prominent names like Yahoo!, Virgin, AOL UK and very recently MSN UK are now associated with the UK online bingo market. Gala bingo, one of the biggest operators of land based or offline bingo in the UK has also started operating online with more of the offline operators pouring into the online bingo business.