90-Ball Bingo
90-ball bingo is the British game, played in halls across the United Kingdom and Ireland and in most British online bingo rooms. Balls numbered from 1 to 90 are drawn one at a time, each ticket carries 15 of them, and every game pays three prizes in turn rather than one.
This page covers the ticket, the strip and the prizes. How the game compares with 75-ball bingo is set out on the bingo hub, and the chance of each prize by call is on the 90-ball odds table.
The Ticket
A ticket has 3 rows and 9 columns. Each row holds exactly 5 numbers and 4 blank cells, so the ticket carries 15 numbers in all. The columns split the range by tens: the first holds 1 to 9, the second 10 to 19, and so on to the last, which holds 80 to 90. Every column has at least one number on the ticket, and numbers run from low to high down each column.
Because the blanks move from row to row, no two rows look alike, and that is what makes a 90-ball ticket slower to read than a 75-ball card for a newcomer. Online games mark the numbers for you and usually show how many each ticket still needs.
The Strip of Six
Tickets are printed in strips of 6 tickets, and a strip shares out all 90 numbers between its tickets with none repeated. Buy a full strip and every number called is on one of your tickets, so no call is ever wasted, though a single ticket in the strip is no more likely to win than any other ticket in the room.
The key point: On one ticket a line takes 64.63 calls on average, slower than the 41.37 of a 75-ball card; across a whole strip the first line comes after 46.56.
One Ticket Against a Strip
Each figure counts the balls drawn until one ticket, or the first of the six on a strip, completes the prize, with no other cards in play. In a room the prizes come sooner, and the room-size table shows by how much.
Three Prizes in Every Game
A 90-ball game does not stop at its first winner. It pays for one line first, meaning any complete row on a ticket. Play then carries on for two lines, any two rows on the same ticket, and finally for the full house, all 15 numbers. The same ticket can win all three, and the prizes usually grow from the first to the last.
A line in 90-ball is always a row. Columns and diagonals do not count, and there are no named shapes like the letters and frames of the American game, so every game plays out the same way. Many halls add a jackpot for a full house made within a set number of calls.
Where 90-Ball Is Played
The game spread through Britain after commercial bingo clubs became legal at the start of the 1960s, and it remains the standard game in British halls and online rooms. Tickets are always bought with real money, as they are what fund the prizes. There is no free 90-ball game in our library; the closest free equivalent is video bingo, a single-player game with smaller cards and a fixed draw, described on the video bingo page.
90-Ball Bingo FAQ
A full strip means every call marks one of your numbers, which feels more active, but each ticket in it has exactly the same chance as any other ticket in the room. Six tickets from one strip and six from six different strips give the same share of the prizes.
Every row has nine cells and only five numbers, so four cells in each row are left blank. The blanks are placed so that each column keeps at least one number and each row keeps exactly five.
Yes. The prizes are played in turn on the same draw, and a ticket that wins the line stays in play for two lines and the full house. Having made the line, it is already part of the way to the later prizes, so a ticket that wins early often stays in contention.
Housey-housey is an old British name for the same game. Tombola is a close Italian relative played with a similar ticket, which also pays for two, three, four and five numbers on one row before the full card.