I’ve been playing bingo for a number of years now, but the other day it suddenly hit me that I hadn’t actually won any “significant” amount of money for some time now. This got me to thinking how much money I had actually paid out and what return I had seen for it. Unsurprisingly I worked out that I was in the red on that front, as I am sure many of other players are. This made me wonder about the odds and figures of the game, the amount of people who play it, chances of winning and how much players spend.
So I got down to some research and I immediately noticed that playing bingo online was by far and away the more prominent form of the game. Now I play online, but I had never realised quite how huge it had become. Looking into the statistics behind it I was amazed to read that since 2008 user figures have risen from 50,000 to an incredible 3 million in 2012. This astonishing boom in the online market is undoubtedly reflected in the sheer volume of bingo companies out there nowadays offering bingo play services.
This figure is made all the more relevant and quite frankly incredible when you consider that the amount the average regular female player spends per month is £120. Equating these numbers together you can begin to see how much money there is in online betting and gaming.
So what is the payout like for us dedicated players then?
The amount of prize money that has been paid out by the national bingo game association since its formation back in 1986 adds up to around £725,179,338, a number which has hopefully grown a little now. But this total pales into insignificance compared to the amount of cash the millions of players pay in themselves each month.
Having said this there are occasionally some welcomed big money wins. The current record jackpot win in the UK was back in 2008, coming in at a tidy sum of £1,200,000. Now it cannot be stressed enough how scarce these types of wins are, as the average “big win” in bingo very rarely goes over £250. Even this is usually a lot less particularly if you play the cheap online penny games which pays out wins of roughly around £12, and even that is dependant of the game and site you play on.
From this it is easy to see why the bingo industry is growing so rapidly, especially in the online market. Big player numbers and expenditure in exchange for minimal payouts is giving these companies big profits, and with the rate the industry is expanding, these numbers are only going to increase.