Ninety ball bingo is the most popular form of bingo played in the UK. It’s also the version you’ll find in most local bingo halls, so if you’ve ever played ‘live bingo’, you’ll probably already be familiar with this game type. As the name suggests, this bingo variant uses 90 balls numbered from 1 to 90.
Given it’s popularity, you probably wont be surprised to hear that it’s also the most common bingo game found on the Virtue Fusion bingo network.
Tickets
The tickets in a 90 ball bingo game are made up of 3 rows and 9 columns of numbers – making 27 squares in total. On each row there will be 5 numbers, and 4 blank spaces – meaning you have 15 randomly selected numbers that you’re trying to match.
For each game, you can purchase a single ticket, or multiple tickets – up to the maximum allowed for the game. As the bingo balls are called, your numbers will be marked off automatically:
Prizes
There are three prizes in the 90 ball bingo game:
- 1 Line – Fill any one of your horizontal lines before anyone else fills one of theirs. It can be any of your three lines.
- 2 Lines – Fill two of your horizontal lines before anyone else – again it doesn’t matter which two lines you complete. This can include the line used to win the 1-line prize, if applicable.
- Full House – Complete your ticket (match every number) to call a full house.
If you are the first person achieve any of these, the bingo software will call it for you – meaning you win the prize, even if you would have been a little slow of the mark. If more than one person wins a prize at the same time, the prize money is split between them. So if the prize for a full house is £50 and two people ‘bingo’ on the same number, they each receive £25.
Note: It is also entirely possible for one person or even one ticket to win all three prizes if they have a lucky run.
Prize Money & Progressive Jackpots
The prize money for each winner is based on the number of tickets purchased overall. So the more players the game has, the larger the jackpot will be. It is also linked to the ticket size, so a 20p game of bingo with 10 players could easily have higher prizes than a 1p game of bingo that has 100 players.
Many 90 ball bingo games have minimum prize funds. This means that no matter how many people buy tickets, the prize fund will be worth winning (relative to the ticket price).
Some 90 ball bingo games also offer progressive jackpots – these are jackpots that keep building and building until they are won and often reach eye watering amounts.
The exact method of winning a progressive jackpot with vary between the games, and plenty of games don’t have them. Those that do usually involve calling ‘house’ in under a set number of balls. If nobody manages to get a full house within the allotted number of balls, the jackpot rolls over to the next game until it is won.
Progressive jackpot games will still have the normal 1-line, 2-lines and full house prizes and only a small portion of the ticket price goes into the progressive pot.