Video Bingo

Each of these runs free in demo mode, with no registration and no deposit. Open the help screen of any of them to see its pattern table and how many balls it draws, then play a few rounds before comparing it with the rest of the free bingo games.

1. Choose your cards. Each card is a grid of three rows and five columns holding 15 numbers. Most games let you switch between one and four cards, and a few offer twenty or a hundred.
2. Set the stake. The stake is per card, so four active cards cost four times one card.
3. Start the draw. The usual game draws 30 balls from a drum of 60, and every number that appears on a card is marked on its own.
4. Collect what the cards made. The pattern table pays each card for the highest shape it completed, and only that one: a card showing a line inside a full row is paid for the row.
5. Decide on extra balls. If a card nearly made a shape, further balls go on sale one at a time, each priced before you buy it.

Many games add a jackpot for the rarest pattern, typically a full card, and some pay it only when all four cards are in play. That condition is printed among the rules and is worth reading before choosing how many cards to run.

In the most common setup, four cards of 15 numbers share no number between them and together hold all 60 numbers in the drum. Every ball drawn therefore marks exactly one cell on one of the cards, and a 30-ball draw always leaves 30 marks spread across the four.

The key number: An average card ends the draw with 7.5 of its 15 numbers marked, and 7 or 8 marks are the most common results.

Some games number their balls from 1 to 90 but load only the numbers printed on the four cards, which works exactly like a drum of 60. Others draw from all 90, and then a third of the numbers in the drum are on no card at all. A full card in any of the four positions within the draw is a 1 in 85,732 event on the common setup.

Each figure is the chance that one card completes a given fixed shape by the end of the draw, before any extra ball. The chance depends only on how many numbers the shape needs, not on where they sit on the card, so an X of eight cells and a frame of eight cells are exactly as likely as each other.

Express games take the opposite approach: 40 balls from 60 in one go, and no extra balls afterwards. The longer draw makes every shape far more likely. A row of five comes in on 12.0% of cards against 2.61% on a 30-ball draw, and a full card is 1 in 1,322 rather than 1 in 342,928. Its pattern table has to pay less for each shape as a result, and the round ends with the draw, so there is no decision to make.

The extra-ball stage follows the draw on most other games: typically 10–14 further balls on a 60-ball game and up to 10 on a 90-ball one, bought one at a time at a price the game sets from what the next ball could win. Some games add a wild ball, which marks whichever number you pick, or hand out an occasional free ball. How often those appear is not published, so they cannot be counted on. Whether a given extra ball is worth its price is worked through in the bingo strategy guide.

Every video bingo game prints its own pattern table, and no two providers use quite the same one. Each entry is a shape drawn on a small card, with its pay shown as a multiple of the card stake. The shapes at the top need most or all of the card, and the shapes at the bottom need four or five numbers. Since only the highest shape on a card is paid, a card that completes two rows is not paid for each row separately.

Two things cannot be read off the table: how often each shape comes in, which the table above answers by the number of cells, and what the game returns overall. The return is stated in the help screen, and some games state two figures, one with extra balls and one without. How the shapes compare on a classic 75-ball card is on the bingo patterns page.