Community Discussions

Can someone talk me through what to expect at a bingo event?

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Hello!

So, this is going to sound really weird I think. I am currently unemployed and I have alot of free time on my hands, and so I was looking through a local newspaper and they have this thing it's like the blind society bingo night and they play bingo 3 nights a week.

I have only really heard of bingo nights from old TV shows, and from what I saw they can be kind of like very serious and competitive, like with people playing 10 cards per game and stuff like that.

I was kind of thinking I might want to try bingo, but I'm kind of scared. I was thinking maybe if someone could talk me through what to expect, it would help.

So I have some questions:

1. Like, how is money handled, like do I have to pay to get in, do I have to pay for each bingo card? How many cards would I need to buy in an average night? Is each bingo card only good for one game? Do you have to buy new cards at the start of every game, like how could they tell what card is for what game? Or do you just have to prove that the card you are holding was good for that one game?
2. How do I mark my cards? I saw on tv that there are like colored ink stamp things maybe? Do I need to bring my own? Will they have them there? Do you have to use stamps, can you like circle the numbers?
3. Am I going to be totally out of place as a 40 ish year old male? TV has taught me that only old ladies go to bingo, is that true?
4. Are these things really super serious business? Like I went to a euchre tournament once as a teenager, and there were a ton of like 60-80 year olds, and maaaaaan. they were not joking around. I made a few smallish etiquette mistakes and there were many frowns to be had. Is bingo a little more welcoming of new people?

So thanks to anyone that can help shed some light on the mysteries of bingo night!

Top Comment: You buy the cards. You pay for each one. Each card is only good for one game. You should buy only one or two for each game. bring a pen to mark the card, but they should have pens or stamps for you. You will be totally out of place. But the women will love having you there. So you will be welcomed. They are very welcoming in Bingo as long as you don't win and don't distract them. They are serious about winning. But they like having a new person there paying money into the pot.

Forum: r/NoStupidQuestions

Friend came up with idea to increase odds of winning at Bingo, what could go wrong? [Canada]

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Going to be a bit cagey about the details because I don't know how much trouble (if any) he might be in. My friend has been having money difficulties recently, and his grandparents took him to Bingo on their dime. They won a couple hundred bucks and as he's an analytical kind of guy he started thinking of ways to "beat the system".

This is a small town Bingo, with fewer than 300 people per night. Runs three times a week and the Jackpot is $2,000 with less than $5,000 total of prizes distributed per night. (Though hot balls can sometimes build until $3-4k additional).

Now, his initial ideas were not legally questionable: simply buy more bingo cards on games that have better expected earnings. You play Bingo against everyone else in the room, so if you increase your share of the cards, you'll have better odds of winning. Minimize the money you spend on games that pay less, and prioritize the games that pay more, and you can tilt your expected earnings in your favor. Easiest way to do this is to play the minimum number of cards for regular games and then play as many Jackpot games as possible.

This alone isn't enough to guarantee a positive return. There are human limits, and even competing against the geriatrics that make up the majority of the bingo hall, he can't play enough more than them to make a significant difference. Logically, the simplest solution is to surpass those human limits, and luckily, Bingo cards are all very standardized. It's very easy to OCR the numbers on the cards and my friend wrote a tiny little phone app to do so from pictures. Theoretically, he could buy 100+ Jackpot cards at the start of the night, mark each card with a number, spend the night taking pictures of the cards and OCRing them into the app, and then, when the jackpot game comes around, type the numbers as they're called into the app, which would tell him which card of his 100s was the winner. Then he could sort through the pile, draw that card, and dob the numbers, then hand it in to collect his winnings.

There is nothing that explicitly forbids this in the ruleset. In his mind, this is functionally identical to, say, bringing a large group of people in and just securing a higher share of the Jackpot game cards for your "group". Certainly there are blocs of players who do this already (even the first night my friend went to Bingo, his grandparents bankrolled him with the expectation that he would share any winnings).

My friend has wrote the app and tested it and it works. But he came to a startling realization the first night he attempted to put his plan into action: the system the Bingo hall uses doesn't have any way of discriminating what night the cards were printed for. In other words, you could buy a card on Tuesday night, and then play it on Friday night. Clever readers will realize the same thing my friend did: his phone app means he doesn't need to 'actually' play the cards, until he knows for a fact that it's a winner. So every card, not just the jackpot, he buys and scans into the app is actually an investment, that can be cashed in at any future point in time once it becomes a winner. Now forget about playing 100s of cards at the same time, my friend could collect thousands and "play" them all simultaneously, only taking out the winner when it's actually won. Obviously there are practical concerns that mean some degree of subterfuge would be required to avoid drawing attention of other players (as even though this is not technically against the rules as written, if other players discovered it, they would surely seek to adjust the rules to render this strategy invalid).

My question is, were my friend to use this technique and this app to win money (not a lot, just enough to pay his bills, maybe less than $2k a month) would he be committing a crime or be required to return any winnings?

Top Comment:

You can freely assume that if your friend consistently costs the bingo hall money, they'll ban him sooner or later. The hall doesn't owe it to him to do business with him. That would still be true if he wasn't also defrauding the house.

Does the hall allow reusing cards? If not, then don't kid yourself: your friend is committing fraud. At some point they're going to notice that he's cashing in more cards than he bought, winning (far) more often than probability would allow for, or straight up catch him at it, and then the police will likely be involved. If he gets out of that only having to pay back his wrongful gains, he'll be lucky: jail time and a criminal record is well within the realm of possibility, here.

If he wants to be sure, he should ask the hall if they mind him bringing cards back from previous nights. I'm sure he'll get his answer, and that's a lot less risky than following through on this "plan."

Forum: r/legaladvice

Can you help me breakdown how to figure out how many Bingo cards can be created without duplicate bingos (with some caveats)?

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I'm trying to figure out how many bingo cards can be created with the following specifications:

1. The grid on the card is 5x5.
2. There are 24 unique items that can be in any space (not limited to certain columns like traditional bingo), and a free space always in the middle.
3. A bingo is 5 in a row in a column, row, or the two diagonals.
4. No card can contain the permutations of a bingo as any other card (e.g. items [0, 1, 2, 3, 4] is the same as items [4, 3, 2, 1, 0]).
5. I am undecided if using a free space should disqualify other sets containing the numbers in the free space set (e.g. [10, 11, Free space, 13. 14] disqualifies [10, 11, 12, 13, 14]).

Here's what I have figured out so far:

1. There are a maximum of 24! possible bingo cards
2. On any bingo card, there are 12 possible bingos, which, when considering the possible permutations, disqualifies 1440 bingos per card (5! * 12), depending on if I'm going to allow rule 5 above to disqualify bingos or not).

I'm not even sure what area(s) of mathematics I should be looking at for this (please let me know if I should adjust the flair), or how to further breakdown the problem. I'm guessing this is math that's above my knowledge level, so any way to ELI5 this would be appreciated. My ultimate intention is to write some code, which will be able to generate unique bingo cards. Knowing how large the set of non-conflicting cards is will influence how I go about creating these bingo cards. Knowing how to calculate this (even if I have to use Wolfram Alpha or something) will make it so I will be able to get further on these types of problems in the future.

EDIT: Here is a sample bingo card, just to make it easier to visualize, and unify any answers around the 24 items in the list.

Top Comment: i dont think im smart enough to get an actual answer for you, but I think I can describe how to do it. First off, the number of cards being disqualified by a single card is a lot higher than 5! * 12 To give an example, lets look at just the first row of the board you have here. That disqualifies all other boards with 0 1 2 3 4 in the first row, in any order. In total, thats 5! * 19! boards, since all the other boxes can have anything and it would still be disqaulified looking at the 2nd row, that disqualifies another 5! * 19! boards. However, theres some overlap between the boards disqualified by the 2nd row and the boards already disqualified by the first row. To be exact, there are 5! * 5! * 14! boards where both the 1st and 2nd row are permutations of the 1st and 2nd row of the board you started with. So to start your answer, it would be 24! - 5! * 19* - 5! * 19! + 5! * 5! * 14! and you would have to keep going to remove all 5 rows, then all 5 columns, and the 2 diagonals. I beleive this is called Inclusion Exclusion Principle, and you could use this to find a final answer. Personally, i hate Inclusion Exclusion because the answer is so messy and it feel very not-elegant. But its the only way I know of to find an answer. Alternatively you could write a program. Not sure if 24! if too large to handle, but im guessing it probably isnt. Although if you have to compare each board to all the others to find out if its legit, then thats n^2 which definitely wont be ok. Would probably need some clever data structure to make the comparisons log(n) instead of linear or something

Forum: r/askmath

Reddit stories idea: keep reading until they get a Bingo

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Wouldn’t let me cross post :(

Top Comment:

I would add some form of the trope Shayne mentions:

"My bf/spouse lit our house in fire. Am I overreacting???"

Forum: r/smosh

r/BingoBrawlers

Main Post: r/BingoBrawlers

Forum: r/BingoBrawlers

Have you ever tried or participated in a reading bingo?

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I participated to a reading bingo last summer at my job. I really liked it. This allowed me to try to read new genres of book and allowed me to discover new books that at first glance did not correspond to my reading habits.

I also found it to be great way to open up discussion with other readers and discuss their choice of book to complete bingo.

Have you ever participated in this and are you like it? If so, I would like to participate in this again, do you know any places?

Thanks!

Top Comment:

I haven’t (yet) participated in, but r/fantasy does a bingo thing every year. I tried to do it last year but found out about it too late to be able to complete it.

Forum: r/books

Does anyone have any insight/guesses on how the bingo tool algorithm works?

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I've been playing with the bingo tool for a while and I try to pick the best without the ai, I'll sometimes compare my move with the ai if I sense my move wasn't the best.

But there are moments where the ai recommends the best move and initially the move doesn't make sense but pays of several moves in the future.

From a computer science perspective does anyone have any guesses on how the algorithm works?

Top Comment: It probably maps out every move possible in the next 3 turns and check which one hits a bingo. Then it’ll associate a score based on how desirable the bingo is. For example, a bingo on the bottom edge is more desirable than a bingo in the very middle. Probably uses memoization of some sort to reduce computation time.

Forum: r/lostarkgame