If you don't know how to play bingo, online or otherwise - first of all, where have you BEEN all your life? Bingo gets played in school, at home, at community centres and on the internet, one would have thought avoiding bingo games was impossible! That said, there are just a few simple rules to the game, and a couple of basic tips that can show you what it takes to win over the competition and bring home those great cash prizes.

The Rules

Bingo games are all generally set up in the same way; you get a card with random numbers written on it, and another person (or program) will pick numbers out at random and call them out. If the numbers you have on your card match those called out, you black them out. Once you black out an entire row or the entire card, you call out BINGO! and collect your prize. See how easy that was? The winning patterns always include straight rows and blackouts but can also include various patterns like diamonds, according to the rules of the specific bingo games.

So How do You Win?

Given that bingo games are so simple and so clearly based on chance, there isn't really a myriad of options available to you when it comes to beating the odds. One of the most common ways of dealing with chance at bingo games is to use more than one card at a time. You'll see this in traditional bingo parlours if you're new to the scene: while you gingerly deal with your one precious bingo card, hoping that no one bumps the table and rearranges all the chips you've laid out to block the called numbers, the seasoned bingo players are out there with a dozen cards at once, speedily blacking out numbers with their special paint daubers. The sound of the daubers against the cards can be deafening at times.

Keeping track of a dozen cards at once isn't the simplest of tasks if you aren't used to the game or that many cards, so by all means work your way up to it! When it comes to online bingo games, however, the multi-card option is a lot simpler to deal with. If you want to manually dab out the numbers yourself, go right ahead, but there should be an option to automatically black out the numbers as they are called - so if you want, bingo games are easier than ever online since you don't have to do much more than watch the numbers black out and keep putting in money!

For traditional parlour bingo games, there are winning strategies that are much like card counting in blackjack; for the online versions, however, programming chances are not along the same lines as real bingo cards. You may also find that you cannot play as many cards at once as you like online, so you'll have to find a comfortable number and do what you can handle at the time - like most things, the internet has changed the strategies of the bingo winners of the parlour age.