Online Bingo Strategies Debunked

Recently there have been a number of publications that suggest that you can increase your chances of winning a bingo by making judicious card choices. This is a fallacy and is based entirely on false assumptions.

The argument generally gets round to suggesting that you should chose bingo cards with different digit endings. The arguments that are proposed go something like this. They say that, in a 75 ball game, at the first draw each number has a one in seventy five chance of being drawn. If the first number drawn ends in the digit 2, the chance of the second number drawn ending with the digit 2 is consequently reduced as there are less numbers remaining that end in 2. If the second number ends with the digit 7, then, by the same argument, the chance of the third number drawn ending with either a 2 or a 7 is also reduced. This means that there is a greater chance that the third number called will end in 1, 3,5,6,8 or 9.

They use this to conclude that a line of numbers such as ‘14, 24, 34, 54, 74' is less likely to produce a winning line than the succession of numbers ‘11, 22, 33, 56, 74'. This notion is completely false, and both lines have an absolutely equivalent chance of winning. If a very large number of games were played, both sets of numbers would win a similar number of times.

The only way in which the choice of numbers could influence the outcome of a game would be if you could chose your numbers after they had started being called, which is of course not the case. In statistics these two cases are called ‘a priori' and ‘a posteriori', and it is very important not to get them confused. The above arguments used in an attempt to convince you that choosing your bingo card numbers is important are ‘a posteriori' arguments applied to an ‘a priori' event (buying your card before the game commences).

Beware of these people who try to use statistics to lie to you, especially
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The argument generally gets round to suggesting that you should chose bingo cards with different digit endings. The arguments that are proposed go something like this. They say that, in a 75 ball game, at the first draw each number has a one in seventy five chance of being drawn. If the first number drawn ends in the digit 2, the chance of the second number drawn ending with the digit 2 is consequently reduced as there are less numbers remaining that end in 2. If the second number ends with the digit 7, then, by the same argument, the chance of the third number drawn ending with either a 2 or a 7 is also reduced. This means that there is a greater chance that the third number called will end in 1, 3,5,6,8 or 9.