How to Play Bingo: The 90-Ball Rules, and How to Win

Bingo takes about a minute to learn. You get a ticket with fifteen numbers on it, somebody calls numbers out at random, and you cross off any that appear on your ticket. Cross off a whole row and you have a line. Cross off all fifteen and you have a full house.

Everything below is the British 90-ball game, which is what a UK hall, pub or work do will be playing. The American 75-ball game uses a different card, and it has its own section further down.

You can play a free round while you read, or put the caller on a screen and run a game for other people.

What is on a bingo ticket

Fifteen numbers, arranged in three rows of nine columns. Twelve of the twenty-seven squares stay blank, so each row holds exactly five numbers and four gaps.

The columns are not random. Each one covers a band of ten:

That is why 7 always sits on the far left of your ticket and 88 on the far right. Hear a number and you already know which column to look in, which is the whole point of the layout.

Tickets usually come in a strip of six. A strip covers every number from 1 to 90 exactly once between its six tickets, so whatever the caller draws, it marks one of them. That is the reason halls sell strips rather than loose tickets.

How you win

One game carries three prizes, and the caller awards them in this order:

1. A line. Any one horizontal row, all five numbers crossed off. Not a column, not a diagonal — a row.
2. Two lines. Any two rows on the same ticket.
3. A full house. All fifteen numbers on one ticket.

The game keeps going after each prize. A line being won does not end anything, and your ticket stays live for the two lines and the full house.

You have to claim. Shout “line” or “bingo”, or press the button if you are playing online, and somebody checks the ticket against the numbers already called. A prize nobody claims goes to the next person who does, so a ticket that quietly completes while you are looking at your phone wins nothing.

What happens during a game

The caller draws numbers one at a time and reads each one out, usually with its traditional call — “two fat ladies, eighty-eight”. Once drawn, a ball does not go back, so the pool shrinks with every call.

You listen, you find the number on your ticket, and you mark it. In a hall you dab it with a felt-tip marker, which is where “dabbing” comes from. Online the marking is usually automatic.

A game takes between ten and fifteen minutes. Callers speed up as the room warms up, and a good one watches the room rather than the board, which is exactly what a machine is for.

What is a full house

All fifteen numbers on a single ticket, crossed off. It is the biggest prize in the game and the last one awarded, and it usually takes almost the whole bag to get there.

On one ticket, a full house typically lands on the 87th call of 90. The fastest across 200,000 simulated rounds took 45 calls, and plenty of rounds run to the last ball in the bag.

90-ball or 75-ball: which game is this

If you are in the UK, it is almost certainly 90-ball. The two games are different enough that the rules do not carry across.

Half the guides that rank for this question describe the 75-ball card. If you have read that a bingo card has twenty-five squares with BINGO across the top, you were reading about a different game. The caller here runs both.

Can you improve your chances of winning

No, and anyone selling you a system is selling you nothing. The draw is random, you do not choose your numbers, and no way of marking them changes which balls appear.

The one thing that genuinely moves your odds is holding more tickets — and it moves them by exactly as much as you would guess, and no more. Against a hall holding sixty other tickets:

Your share of the prizes tracks your share of the tickets, to within the noise of the measurement. Six tickets buy six tickets’ worth of chances, and not a scrap more.

Some numbers are not luckier than others. Across 100,000 draws, every number should appear in the first thirty calls about 33,333 times. The least-drawn managed 32,985 and the most-drawn 33,688 — a gap of two per cent, which is what randomness looks like rather than a pattern.

You may see the Tippett theory quoted, which says long games drift toward the middle numbers and short games toward the extremes. Even where the maths holds, it changes nothing you can act on, because in 90-ball you play the ticket in front of you.

How long a game takes, in calls

Useful if you are running one and need to know how long to book the room for. These are the calls a single ticket needs.

Measured over 200,000 simulated rounds against this site’s own ticket generator, from a fixed seed so the figures hold if you re-run them. Hold a strip of six and your first line arrives much earlier, around the 47th call, because you have six chances at it instead of one.

How to run a game yourself

You need three things: tickets for everyone, a way of drawing numbers at random, and somebody willing to read them out.

• Tickets. Books of 90-ball strips are cheap from any stationer or party shop. For a small group, printed sheets work.
• The draw. The caller on this site draws the numbers, says them out loud with the traditional calls, keeps the board of everything already called, and goes fullscreen for a television. It handles 90-ball and 75-ball.
• The rules, announced first. Say which prizes are in play and in what order before the first ball. Most arguments in a bingo room start here.

Check the rules before you charge for tickets or hand out prizes. The UK regulates bingo played for money, and small events fall under their own exemptions — worth reading rather than guessing at.

Play a round now

The game on this site deals you a full strip of six tickets and calls the numbers, so you can watch the rules happen instead of reading about them. There is no stake, no prize and no sign-up.

If you would rather play the same round as everybody else, the daily strip gives every player the same six tickets and the same draw once a day.