When you play bingo in a bingo hall, the number of players in the room can have an impact on your chances of winning. How about Class II Bingo Machines, which look like slot machines but are still playing bingo?
Playing bingo style machines. Does your odds change with the amount of people in the casino? Thoughts were the less people the better the odds but doesn’t seem like we do as good until later in the morning when more people are present.
Scott C.
The bingo hall scenario and Bingo Machines differ in some critical ways, and that means how they work differ too. For bingo halls, you play a set period of time, a set number of games, and a set number of prizes (with the exception of some side bet style arrangements that can unlock progressives and so on).
This means that less people in the room can be beneficial – regardless if you’re playing against 10 other people or 100, there’s only going to be so many games and so many winners. So playing bingo in a bingo hall when it’s less busy can be an opportunity.
With the Bingo Machines, it’s all open ended – the number of participants, the number of wagers placed, and even the number of potential participants based on how many machines are linked together. So aside from having two players to ensure the minimum is reached for how many are playing, it’s more now in the range of the odds of getting a winning pattern on your board.
Different types of Bingo Machines handle these things in different ways. We saw an Aristocrat machine recently where the outcome of the bonus was determined by a separate Bingo card – an indication that the value of the bonus wasn’t predetermined based on the original Bingo wager and outcome.
We’ve seen some machines have a series of patterns and prizes in the pay table, and some where the winning combination to get paid, regardless of amount, is always the same. Generally each game maker has their own approach to get there.
What this all means for the player is that Bingo Machines are increasingly slot-like in their math, even though the wager and outcome itself is handled differently. And that means the number of players and other such considerations are less critical than the chances of a bingo pattern happening, which doesn’t change regardless of how many other people are playing.
Instead, it works more like the odds of a particular win happening based on the outcomes possible on a game and the chances of that outcome being selected by the random number generator. So in that way most modern Bingo Machines aren’t much different, aside from the way an outcome is determined.
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