Is online bingo fixed?
When you play online bingo and do not win, the temptation is to simply conclude that it is fixed.
You are playing on a website, against other players, but you do not see them and you certainly do not see any balls coming out of a machine. When you are down the club, you can see the players, the caller, the balls. When someone wins, you are disappointed, but you know it is all above board.
But when it’s online, you don’t see these things and you start coming up with all sorts of conspiracy theories about robot players and games being fixed for them to win over genuine players.
However, when we have spoken to industry figures at gaming conferences, they all agree that this perception is simply not true, but impossible to shake off.
Bingo is gambling like any other form of betting, but there is a simple way to increase your chances of winning, and that is to buy more tickets than anyone else.
What we advise is sticking to bingo sites, or bingo rooms on a site where the amount of tickets any one player can purchase is fixed. This way, you avoid those big spenders who buy more than half of the tickets in the game and win more often because of it.
We would also advise players to stick to a budget and do not go over it. All too often we see posts from players complaining of a site being fixed, which say “I spent £1,000 at Site X and only won once.”
If you are spending that much money on online bingo then you really need to be playing smarter, or playing less often.
Last year we approached a number of online bingo software providers, posing as bingo site managers, looking to get hold of software that would allow them to fix the games to their own ends. However, not one of the software providers said their software would allow us to do this. It was not just unethical, but impossible and also against the law.
The ultimate truth is that online bingo sites are not fixed, but the perception that they are will never go away. This is simply because people are sore losers, and will always blame others first for their losses, rather than at themselves.