Playing Bingo for a Fortune

The term bingo fortune can mean different things to different people. My grandmother was happy when she won a roll of nickels at her bingo game. Of course my grandmother, who has played bingo once a week every week since she was 18, and has probably seen almost all 1,474,200 possible bingo cards, never bets more than one dollar. Her bingo allowance started at a dime, but even in her local game the stakes were slightly affected by inflation, and Grandma can’t play just one card.

I’m searching for a different bingo fortune. I’ve been playing bingo since I was a kid, Grandma taught me, and the game has always had a certain draw to it. Yeah, spending quality time with Grandma in a bingo hall may have had something to do with it, but my bingo fortune isn’t a sentimental tale of family love being the real jackpot in my life. I love my Grandma, but I play bingo to win.

It started in Grandma’s bingo hall. A roll of nickels was the prize for getting a straight bingo. The final game, the blackout, was a roll of quarters. My ten year-old eyes looked at that small roll, the ten-dollar bingo jackpot, and transformed it into a chest of gold. Every daub moved me further to the X, and on my bingo card that X just happened to be N-42. “Look, Grandma, all I need is N-42.” “N-42,” she said. “N-42,” but it wasn’t me answering her. “BINGO!” I was shy, I was ten years old, but I yell bingo loud enough to almost give the old lady across from us a heart attack.

That was my first bingo fortune, a roll of quarters. I loved winning so much that I made my mother take me to play bingo even when we weren’t at Grandma’s. I would play once a week, fifty cents; five bingo cards because that’s all my mother would give me. But then I turned 18 and could get my own bingo cards. I was the only college kid who would spend a Friday night playing bingo, but I would win. I won all the time, but it just wasn’t enough. A 20 dollar bingo jackpot here, the occasional hundred, but I wanted something that really got my blood flowing. What does a ten year olds roll of quarters turn into when he’s 20? That’s the bingo fortune I needed, something equivalent to that treasure chest.

But where do you find a bingo jackpot larger than a couple hundred bucks? The bingo halls just aren’t big enough, and the real high stakes games don’t exactly come around once a week. Where could I play bingo, whenever I wanted to, with jackpots that could actually be called a bingo fortune? Where could a bingo game be put together with players from around the country, around the world, without having to travel far distances? I wanted the biggest bingo game ever, the 60,000 person game that happened in New York, but bigger, a million players, but how?
And then it hit me, like email spam turned into fillet mignon. This isn’t my grandmothers bingo anymore. Internet bingo is where it has to happen. That’s where my bingo fortune is waiting.

Thanks to the internet bingo is no longer a strictly American game. When you play online you are likely to meet other players from just about any country you can think of. Bingo is no longer confined to church basenents and traditional bingo parlors. Not only are the jackpots higher but you can play just about any form of bingo conceivable. Games move a lot faster and on most sites there are new games every few minutes. Any number of people can play at the same time and the number of players is unlimited. Jackpots are much larger than at a traditional bingo hall because of the number of players. Bingo has come a long way since the days when the top prize was a roll of quarters.