The worlds of bingo and sports betting don’t often mix terribly well, and as a general rule, those who play bingo don’t tend to be bettors and those who bet don’t tend to play bingo.
This is a generalisation of course, and not a hard and fast rule; we are all individuals with our own likes and dislikes after all – that’s why Sharon down the road always wears that Godawful fluffy cardigan but thinks she looks amazing…
But enough about Shazza.
Gambling companies are always interested in ways to get their customers to try out other products, this is why games like Slingo exist, to try and get slots players into bingo and bingo players into slots, and this might explain bingo in betting shops.
We have only actually ever spotted it in PaddyPower shops, but that’s not to say the idea isn’t being tried elsewhere too.
What we are interested in though, is how it works, why it is there in the first place, and who is playing it?
What is Bingo in Betting Shops?
First thigs first, don’t get too excited.
It’s not traditional bingo, there is no bingo caller unfortunately, and actually, the whole thing works completely differently despite the basic concept being the same.
There is a dedicated TV screen showing the games, which are run automatically on an RNG, every 3 minutes throughout the day.
It’s a bit more like a cross between bingo and the lottery if anything, because unlike with traditional bingo you can pick your own numbers.
In PaddyPower shops, the game is called Quick 6 Bingo, because you need to pick 6 different numbers from 49 numbers in total.
In effect this makes it a game of 49 ball bingo.
The quicker your 6 numbers come up the more you stand to win, with a £100,000 prize if your numbers are the first six called, down to £1 if you get them all by 35 calls. If you don’t match them all by 35 then you win nothing as the game stops at this point.
Here is what you can win and when:
| # Calls | Prize |
|---|---|
| 6 | £100,000 |
| 7 | £10,000 |
| 8 | £5,000 |
| 9 | £2,500 |
| 10 | £1,000 |
| 11 | £500 |
| 12 | £300 |
| 13 | £200 |
| 14 | £150 |
| 15 | £100 |
| 16 | £90 |
| 17 | £80 |
| 18 | £70 |
| 19 | £60 |
| 20 | £50 |
| 21 | £40 |
| 22 | £30 |
| 23 | £25 |
| 24 | £20 |
| 25 | £15 |
| 26 | £10 |
| 27 | £9 |
| 28 | £8 |
| 29 | £7 |
| 30 | £6 |
| 31 | £5 |
| 32 | £4 |
| 33 | £3 |
| 34 | £2 |
| 35 | £1 |
The above is based on £1 bets per game.
So you basically have a 35 in 49 chance of winning at least your stake back, which is about 71.4%.
You can choose to play just the next game, or the next 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 25, or 50, and the stake you select will be applied to each game; so a £1 stake on the next 50 games would cost £50.
You can’t skip games or choose specific ones to play, the game rolls on regardless and you will simply entered into the next one to start after your money has been handed over.
You can bet as little as 10p per game up to £20 per game, but the winning amounts will change if you bet lower or higher than £1. Just be aware the max payout per customer is £250,000, so it doesn’t make sense to bet much more than a pound a game anyway.
You can pick more than 6 numbers if you want to and still only need 6 of them to come up in order to win (it’s called perming), but this gets expensive pretty quickly. Even if you only add one more number, so seven in total rather than six, it will cost 7 bets instead of 1 because of all the different permutations.
For our money, it stops being fun at this point so we would stick to 6 numbers and £1 bets, but that’s just us!
Example Game
Dennis goes into his local PaddyPower to make a bet on a horse race, but there is 20 minutes until it starts, so he decides to kill some time by playing Quick 6 Bingo.
He takes a slip, picks his 6 numbers, and indicates that he wants to play the next 5 rounds at £1 per game.
He pays his £5 and now stands to win if his numbers are called quickly enough in the next 5 games.
- Game 1 – His first 3 numbers are called within 10 calls and he gets very excited. By call 35 though only 1 other number has come up so he wins nothing.
- Game 2 – A total bust. Only 2 numbers came up after 35 calls.
- Game 3 – After a slow start, 4 numbers come up in a row, with a 5th on call 22. Dennis last number comes up on call 32, winning him £4.
- Game 4 – Another win. This time all 6 numbers were called by call 28, netting Dennis another £8.
- Game 5 – It’s close, with 5 numbers called by call 28, but that last number just didn’t show up in the end.
In total then, Dennis put down £5, and got £12 back, enjoying his 20 minute wait for the race and pocketing £7 which he could spend on his dinner later.
Nice one Dennis.
You can see then that there is potential to win a lot, a little, or nothing, and you are not competing against other players as you would be in a bingo hall.
This makes the game more of a solo activity in some ways, but betting shops are sociable places to go so it can be just as good an opportunity for a chat as a bingo hall would be.
Games are faster though and with no card to mark you could lose track of whether or not you have won anything, although the cashier will be able to check for you very quickly.
Additionally, even though you can play for as little as 10p per game, you might get through your funds more quickly.
Why Does Bingo in Betting Shops Exist?
As we mentioned, gambling companies like their customers to try as many of their different products as possible, and as in our example above, someone might spend an extra couple of quid on something like this.
Once it is up and running it doesn’t need any involvement from staff other than taking tickets at the counter, so it’s a nice cheap way to maybe make more money for the bookie, and a nice cheap way to fill some time for the player, but still has the potential to pay out big money.
It could also be used to try and attract new types of customers.
Bookmakers can be intimidating places if you haven’t spent much time in them, especially if people are in there who have a lot riding on an outcome – loud cheering and even the occasional episode of cursing isn’t exactly unheard of.
But if there is a familiar friendly game in there like bingo (or something close to it), perhaps a new customer might venture inside.
Flip that on its head, and the majoritively male crowd in a bookmakers might be encouraged to use a bookmakers online bingo products at home if they have been introduced to the game in store, so it works both ways.
Bookmakers have gaming machines in them as well as all of the sports betting paraphernalia, so really these businesses are aiming to be all things to all people, and this bingo/lottery hybrid is just another way of achieving that.
Who Plays Bingo in Betting Shops?
We actually did a bit of snooping here and went to play the game ourselves, and from our experience, the players are mainly middle aged men.
That’s interesting because, although the number of men playing bingo is on the rise, it is still a female dominated game, especially offline.
We did see a few women in there, but non played Quick 6 Bingo during our time visiting, although that doesn’t mean it never happens.
What’s more, most players only played for a handful of games, so it was definitely being used as a time killer rather than a reason to visit the shop in the first place. An experience enhancer if you like.
This also means that the players were mainly sports bettors, which is interesting again because like we said at the start, that’s not the typical demographic for bingo.
If you went to a bingo hall you would be there for a good few hours, mainly for the bingo and/or slots, plus the social aspect and maybe even a meal, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with bingo in betting shops.
You might get a cup of coffee and a biscuit in a bookies but you’ve no chance of being served hunters chicken and chips!
Could Automatic Bingo be Used in Other Venues?
In theory, there is no reason why this same sort of game couldn’t be installed in pubs, entertainment centres, and the like. After all, they have slot machines right?
That’s true, but the difference is that slot machines don’t require any sort of involvement from staff to play them. They are 100% user operated.
Games like Quick 6 Bingo require a cashier to take the bet in the first place and pay out winnings, and this could cause a problem to the venue if they don’t already have a cashier set up. Trying to get bar staff to take bingo tickets behind the bar wouldn’t really work, for example.
If the developers could create a way to pay with cash or card independently then it might work, but depending on the venue a different type of licence may be required, and the bingo game would be unlikely to net them enough profit to make it worth it.
So we don’t expect to see games like Quick 6 Bingo popping up in many other locations any time soon. It’s been running in 600+ PaddyPower shops since before 2019 though so it is clearly doing well enough for them to keep it around, but they are an established company with regular customers who already have a gambling license for bingo and all of their other products.
It might appear in more bingo halls though, as something to do in between live games. This would make plenty of sense as an additional option that is related but also offers a bit of variety between traditional bingo and slot machines.