Bingo is an entertaining game of chance that involves a lot of concentration and some dumb luck. Or does it? Studies have shown that the entire game of bingo can be reduced to a few simple mathematical equations of probability. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to understand these equations. And knowing them could give you an upper hand in winning huge cash prizes!
The rules:
A typical game of Bingo has a card with 24 semi-random numbers arranged in a square of 5 rows and 5 columns. These numbers are called semi random because each column only contains numbers in a fixed range. For instance Column one will contain five numbers within a range of one to fifteen but in a random order. The other four columns contain numbers in the range 16-30, 31-45, 46-60, and 61-75 respectively. The centre box is left free. This means that there are more than 552 million billion billion different combinations in a bingo card!
While playing a game, the announcer will call out a set of numbers randomly that lie in the range of 1 – 75. Whenever any of the numbers that have been called matches a number on a player’s Bingo card, the number is marked off the card. The game of bingo is over when a player gets 5 numbers in a straight line of column in the case of the classic game, or all the numbers required to form a particular pattern as required by the game.
Calculating the Bingo Probability:
The general rule while calculating probability is that for a particular number of boards, the probability of getting a Bingo when the Nth number is called is the difference between the cumulative probability for the Nth number and that of the (N-1)th number.
For instance if a particular game requires a player to get three particular numbers out of the possible 75, the three numbers plus two random numbers from the other 72 numbers will have about 1,215,450 different combinations possible. Thus, the probability of getting bingo is 72/1,215,450 = 0.000059. Although this number looks small when multiplied by the total number of boards and total number of players, it could give you a fair chance of winning the game. Thus by knowing the number of players, the number of cards and the price of each card, you could easily estimate the amount of money you will make in a given period of time!
Most online communities make it easier for the players and do the calculation themselves. These numbers are the displayed on their website allowing players to know their chance of winning before the actual game is played. This will be very helpful as it could tell you how much of money you will have to invest before you start making money!
So whether you are a die hard bingo fanatic with very little luck or even a student with a school project due very soon, studying these numbers could prove to be very useful. You could win money or grades and also learn a lot in the process!
Tags: bingo, bingo probabilities, bingo rules
