How Do You Win The Jackpot In Bingo?

How do you win the jackpot in bingo?

You get lucky!

No, seriously. In a fair play environment, bingo is a heavily randomized game with no particular player skill required to participate. A brand-new player has essentially the same chance to win as someone who’s been playing for decades.

Unlike some other games of chance, there are only two realistic ways players can affect the outcome, and neither relates directly to the game itself.

The Odds of Victory

Each set of bingo tickets has a roughly equal chance of winning any particular game. Therefore, the chance of winning is the number of tickets you’re playing divided by the total number of tickets in the game.

If your location allows it, you can play more tickets at once. It takes some experience with bingo to get good at marking sheets correctly, but if you’re playing online, the computer will often do it for you.

However, other people can also play more tickets, and there’s a limit to what you can realistically keep track of.

Games with fixed jackpots tend to have fewer players because the pot won’t grow. Games with progressive or escalator jackpots, which get bigger over time, tend to attract more players. They’re higher-risk, but also higher reward.

If you want to increase your odds and win a jackpot in bingo, the best thing to do is find a game that doesn’t have too many other people. Bingo always has a winner, so the fewer people you compete against, the more likely you are to win. You can check rooms on bingo sites like Buzz Bingo to see how many others are playing.

 

House Rules

How do you win the jackpot in bingo if there are house rules?

In short, the type of game you play affects the jackpot rates.

As a good rule of thumb, the bigger the jackpot is, the harder it is to win it. If you spin that around, you can see that lower jackpots are relatively easy to win. If you’re in a group with twenty or thirty people and play regularly, then statistically, you’ll also win regularly.

Most bingo games use one of three jackpots, but online bingo sites (like those we recommend playing on) may offer other games with different odds. Every bingo game has a winner, and winners usually get a prize no matter what. However, they may also have larger jackpots that people only win occasionally.

 

Best Odds: Fixed Jackpots

Fixed jackpot games have a set prize pool regardless of the number of players or the tickets bought. These are a popular choice among people who play casually or irregularly since they tend to have fewer players in each room.

Organisers may split up groups for fixed jackpots to try and maintain an ideal number of participants per game. This helps balance costs and reward rates to keep each participant’s odds comparatively high.

While that may sound odd at first, remember that organisers have the incentive to make people feel like they have a chance to win. People will only want to play if the odds are high and the reward is good. For that matter, reputable locations also disclose how much of each ticket goes back to players, making evaluating them even easier.

 

Moderate Odds: Progressive Jackpots

Moderate odds in bingo come with progressive jackpots. These are particularly popular for online games and with serious players.

In a progressive jackpot, a set amount from each ticket sale goes into a larger pot, separate from the regular prize pool. The amount varies by company and sometimes table, but around 2% is common for online games. While this may not seem like much money at first, it can add up quickly, especially if nobody wins it.

Progressive pool payouts depend on how someone wins them. Winning a game in a particularly low number of calls (about 32, for most places) gives the most from the pot, while willing with a higher score may earn less than 1% of the total prize pool.

Progressive jackpots can have some of the highest rewards in bingo. However, as the reward increases, so does the number of people playing. That makes it harder to win because more people are playing.

If you’re trying to win big, finding a progressive jackpot in which fewer people are playing can be a good way. However, companies try to manage advertising games to draw in more people when the pot is high, so that only gets you so far.

The practical result of progressive jackpots is that they have moderate risk, but also moderate rewards for most players. You’re less likely to win here, but if you do, the prize tends to be significantly better than a fixed jackpot offers.

Sites like Swanky Bingo may have players from multiple companies playing together, so progressive jackpots can grow quickly.

 

Best Reward: Escalator Jackpots

Escalator jackpots have a complex route to victory. Unlike progressive jackpots, which pay out a set amount for each victory, escalator jackpots have a fixed prize rate and a larger pot that only pays out once.

What makes escalator jackpots attractive to players is that they get easier to win over time. As the pot grows, so does the number of calls allowed to win the pot. This keeps progressing until someone wins the pot.

Like progressive jackpots, having a larger pot encourages more people to play, which speeds up the growth of the pot and attracts even more people. However, this doesn’t affect your odds of winning the pot as obviously as you might expect.

While it’s true that more people means it’s more likely someone will win, an escalator jackpot requires winning fast enough, and nobody playing can guarantee that.

 

Final Thoughts

So, how do you win the jackpot in bingo? The real way to win is to play the game. Bingo games at reputable websites and in-person locations are equally fair to all players, with your ability to affect the odds limited to the number of cards you play and selecting games with fewer competitors.

This fairness is one of the main reasons many people love bingo.

Last updated: Jan 24, 2023