What is the biggest game of bingo you have ever played?
A few hundred people in your local club? Probably a great atmosphere with that many people in there, but you can find much bigger games online.
If you have played much online then you will likely have played games against as few as 5 and as many as 500 and maybe even more. Less of an atmosphere but a much bigger game.
You have probably never experienced a situation where you weren’t able to join a game of bingo because it was full though.
Bingo halls are massive and online games obviously have no space limitations, so the fact you can just turn up at a game and be pretty sure you will be able to join in is just one more thing to add to the list about how brilliant this daft game is.
There must be a limit though, right? Well let’s see.
How Many People Can Play a Game of Bingo?
Let’s answer a different question first.
Let’s look at the biggest ever game of bingo on record and see how impressive that number is and how it worked.
It happened in Japan in 2010, when 493,824 people all played the same game online. So almost half a million played but we don’t know how many tickets were used.
It didn’t happen by chance of course, it was arranged by Coca Cola who sponsored the event and the platform it was run on.
The biggest game ever played in person was in Colombia in 2006, where 70,080 people congregated for what must have been an incredible afternoon of bingo. It’s a tiny number compared to what happened in Japan, but to see all those people there in person dabbing away must have been quite a sight.
So we know that at least around 500,000 people can potentially play at the same time – imagine the prize pot!
But, in theory, could it be even more?
Can Bingo Games Ever Sell Out?
The danger with selling too many tickets, you might think, is that you could end up in a situation where the two players have the same numbers and therefore could both win at the exact same time.
You don’t need to worry about that though because there are so many different 90 ball bingo ticket possibilities that it would never happen.
How many? You ready for this?
There are 24 Quadrillion different possible bingo ticket combinations.
Written in numbers it looks like this: 24,069,639,359,475,000.
To put that number into perspective, if there were 1million players in a game then each one of those players would need to buy over 24 billion tickets before all the possible combinations were taken – and good luck dabbing through that lot.
We’ve got a whole article on it here if you like big numbers.
If you look at 75 ball bingo the number is 23 billion times higher than that of 90 ball, because the layout is different and allows for more combinations.
Even looking at the 30 ball bingo (otherwise known as speed bingo) which has the smallest number of combinations, there are 1.7 million different possible ticket combinations.
Safe to say then, that selling out of tickets is not a worry that has ever crossed the mind of a single bingo hall manager or online operator.
So the answer is no, a game of bingo can’t sell out, not realistically anyway.
However, it is possible for a game of bingo to be full and unable to accept any more players, even though it would never sell out of tickets.
Bingo Halls
Although there are a seemingly infinite number of possible bingo tickets, bingo halls don’t have an infinite number of seats.
They might be huge cavernous buildings but even the biggest – which is MERKUR Bingo in Cricklewood if you were interested – caps out at 2,700 max capacity.
This means that even though there would still be a phenomenal number of potential tickets left unsold, the number of people that can play in the venue is still limited by the venue’s size.
So in some ways a game of bingo does have a limited number of players but it is only limited by external factors, not by the game itself.
Bingo would never do that to us!
Online
The only way an online game of bingo could ever really get too full is if there were so many people playing that the server running the game was unable to cope.
If words like ‘server’ make you instantly turn off then don’t worry, that’s about as technical as we will get!
It’s basically the engine that runs the games, but servers have their limitations too and can only process so much information, but the ones online bingo games run on are really powerful and are designed to cope with loads of players, so it’s unlikely to happen.
Along very similar lines the operator’s website could technically become overloaded if there were too many people playing from the same brand.
If you have ever tried to shop online during Black Friday you might have been put in a queue to access a website with a very popular product on sale, and it’s for the same reasons.
With online bingo though, players in the same game will come from a number of different bingo brands’ who all use the same bingo network, so even if there are 100,000 people playing the game, that number would be split across many different bingo sites.