Are You More Likely to Win if There are Less People in a Bingo Room?

Woman Celebrates Online Bingo WinBingo players with any sense about them will always be looking for cheeky ways to get ahead, or find an advantage that gets them closer to the front of the winners queue.

Obviously, it’s a game of chance really so there is only so much the player can do to improve their chances, but what about figuring out the quiet times and playing then?

Surely that would give you more chance of winning, right?

It stands to reason that the fewer players there are competing for the prize then the more chance each player in the room has.

This may well be true, but it isn’t the whole story as you will soon find out.

Player Numbers and Prize Sizes

Bingo Player Numbers

The quickest among you will have already realised that, while it’s true that a game with fewer players gives all of those players a bigger chance of winning, in most games this will also mean a smaller prize pot.

The prize is usually created by pooling together all the money raised by selling tickets, so if not many tickets are sold the prize will not get very high.

Now this might not really bother you, after all, a win is a win. Plus, if you are happy to play a lot of bingo you could attempt to mop up all of the smaller prize pots and ignore the really busy games.

You can find quieter games by playing at less social times like early in the morning or late at night, or by playing on sites which use less popular bingo networks.

There is something else to think about here though, and that is ticket sales vs the number of players in the room.

Ticket Sales

Bingo TicketsLet’s imagine you buy ten tickets in a room with just two other players in it. So there are three players altogether, you know you have bought ten tickets but you don’t know how many tickets the other players have bought.

This is a bit of a problem because you don’t know how competitive you are in this situation. You can get some idea of how many tickets have been sold from the size of the pot, but you can’t be sure.

Statistically, each ticket has the same chance of being the winner, so if one of those players has bought 100 tickets and the other player has bought 20, they both have more chances of winning the pot. Their tickets don’t individually have a better chance of winning, each of your ten tickets has the exact same chance as each of their combined 120, but because they have more tickets those players have given themselves more chances.

If you want to get ridiculous, a game with just you and one other player where you have 1 ticket and the other player has 1,000 is not going to have goods odds of you winning, even though there are only two people in the room.

Bingo Games with Big Prizes and Low Player Numbers

Bingo Jackpots

This is the holy grail for players wanting to give themselves the very best chances of winning, but how can these sorts of games exist?

Well, occasionally big games with guaranteed prizes or fixed jackpots are played. This means the prize pot is set at a certain level regardless of how many tickets are sold. If you can find one of these and get to it on a day when not many other people turn up, your chances will improve.

This actually tends to happen more in real life bingo halls rather than online, where things like bad weather can affect how many players turn up. Online there are fewer factors to put players off, but there is also a lot more competition for business online, so if you keep your ear to the floor and scan lots of sites you might notice a few sites running these games at the same time, and you can go to the one that is the quietest.

You might also just get lucky some days once you are armed with this knowledge. You might notice that a big game has fewer players than usual if you play there a lot, and that would be a good time to maybe buy more tickets if you can afford to.

So is it Better to Play Bingo Games with Fewer Players?

Shrugging GirlNot really. Every other player in the room also has a greater chance of winning, and a lot depends on how many tickets you have compared to everyone else, and that is something you can’t know.

You also can’t control who buys the winning ticket, so even if you thought everything was in your favour a lucky player buying a single ticket could still come along and wipe up all the prizes.

Basically, for every advantage you get there is a disadvantage somewhere else; if there are less players there is also less money to win, if you buy more tickets than anyone else it costs you more and you could still lose.

The best thing to do is treat bingo as fun, play the rooms you enjoy with the number of tickets you can afford and then just cross your fingers.