In any game of bingo, you know that the person who gets there first wins the prize. While the numbers called will always be somewhere on your screen, by the time you look down to see what numbers have been called and daub them on the appropriate tickets, someone else could have already called the bingo. When playing 90 ball bingo it is even more important to keep up with the numbers because there are six tickets you will be playing with! They are lined up in a strip of six and each ticket will be 3 rows by 9 columns. Each row will have 5 numbers on it and when you have daubed a complete line, it’s a bingo. Stage two is two lines and stage three is all three lines on the same ticket, commonly referred to as a full house.
To speed up the game, learn where you can find your numbers! Column one will have numbers 1 through 9, while column two will have 10 through 19. The third column is 20 through 29, the fourth 30 through 39, the fifth 40 through 49, the sixth 50 through 59, the seventh 60 through 69 and the eighth has 70 through 79. Finally, since there are 90 numbers, the last column has eleven numbers running from 80 to 90. By learning which column the numbers fall in, when they are called you can quickly spot them on the appropriate ticket to daub them quickly. If you want to win the game, speed is of the essence!
Although this is a game that is specific to the UK as North America and several other places use the 75 ball version, 90 ball bingo may be a bit confusing at first to the novice bingo player. The first thing to learn before playing this game is to understand how the tickets are laid out. You will be playing online, of course, so the ‘tickets’ will be on your screen and the dauber will be your mouse, but the game is played exactly the same as it is in bingo halls, and the tickets will be laid out the same.
When playing 90 ball bingo you will get a ‘strip’ of six tickets lined up one on top of the other. Each ticket has 9 vertical columns and three horizontal rows and is called a 3 x 9. Consequently, there will always be only 9 columns but the entire strip will have 18 rows (3 rows times 6 tickets equals 18 rows). This is where it gets a bit complicated to understand.
First of all, 90 ball bingo will have all 90 balls/numbers on the strip. However, each row of 9 will only have 5 numbers across while the first column will have 9 numbers; the next seven columns will have 10 numbers with the final column having 11 numbers. Adding up the columns across you will see that there are exactly 90 numbers. Although each row will have exactly 5 numbers the columns would have nine, ten or eleven numbers.
To make a long story short, a strip has six tickets each being 3 x 9 and there are exactly 90 numbers filled in on the strip, spread out across all six tickets. Understanding the 90 ball bingo strip is just the beginning! From here, you can learn how to play the game.
