90-ball bingo

90-ball bingo is very popular in Europe, Australia and Latin America.  Known more as a community activity than a gambling game, it made its appearance on the Internet at the same time online casinos took off.  Its success was so great that it lead to gaming sites devoted exclusively to bingo.

90-ball bingo is played with cardboard sheets displaying tables divided into 27 sections.  The tables are comprised of 3 rows and 9 columns. Each table includes numbers placed within 15 of the 27 sections.  12 sections are left empty.  Columns typically contain only one number.

The numbers within the table range from 1 to 90. The first column contains numbers from 1 to 9, the second 10-19, the third 20-29 and so on through the ninth column, which contains numbers between 80 and 90. Each card is unique and its number distribution random.

The director of the game begins to extract balls marked with numbers between 1 and 90, announcing aloud each number drawn.  If a player finds this number on one or more of his tables, he blackens the square where the number is marked.  The game continues until a player blackens all the numbered cells in a table, shouts "Bingo" and ends the game.

In 90-ball bingo there are three opportunities to win: completion of one row within a table; completion of two rows within a table; and completion of all 15 numbers within a table, in which case the player makes Bingo.

When playing bingo online, players employ virtual cards in lieu of cardboard cards.  Instead real balls marked by numbers from 1 to 90, numbers are called based on the game software’s random number generation algorithm (RNG).  The numbers that appear on the virtual card are also determined by a RNG algorithm. 

When gaming online, players may also elect to daub their squares automatically with an online bingo hall feature that recognizes the correlation between called numbers and numbers on a player’s card. As in live bingo, completing one or two lines awards a prize, but the game goes on until a player succeeds in completing the entire table and calling Bingo!