Bingo games have been around since George Formby was a little lad, and were as much a British institution as fish and chips. However over the last ten to fifteen years, despite their tremendous popularity and loyal customers, Bingo halls gradually began to disappear from the local scene just as other UK cultural centres like the cinema also made their way into history. There just wasn’t enough financial viability to keep these small and slightly dilapidated bingo halls open, with one of the biggest problems being the heavy insurance premiums due to possible fire and safety risks. Gradually all of these little havens closed their doors to be replaced by super-bingo halls, but only in the large cities. This meant that not only that many of the most died-in-the –wool bingo lovers in the UK denied their weekly and sometimes even twice weekly game of bingo they also missed out on the social gatherings that were as much a part of it. So a vast gap was left in the lives of tens of thousands of UK bingo players, the majority of them women who had been deprived of their favourite pastime and through no fault of their own.
However as the online gaming revolution began to gain strength, some bright online casino marketing team with a taste for nostalgia began to recognise that there might be a market for online bingo halls. Little could they have imagined how right they would be, and the word that it was now possible to play bingo online spread like wildfire?
One of the biggest fears that the people who established these sites had was that there would not be enough players who would know enough to be able to play online. Their fears were legitimate as after it does take a lot of money to establish an online casino web site in any format, and their worry was that much as there was a demand and a lot of interest, players would not be able to master the software. They obviously underestimated the determination of the bingo lover, and people who had taken little interest in the wonders of the internet till then appeared to become computer proficient overnight. To allow them to put their feet in the water, most of the online bingo halls worth joining allowed their new members to play as guest for as long as they wanted.
Once these players felt strong enough with their online bingo skills, they then could become real money players and relive some of the good times of old, The question is whether online bingo halls are here to stay have been answered long since, and it’s not unusual for a group of bingo lovers to organise a joint online session, where several players all sit with their laptops perched on their knees waiting for their turn to call ” house!”