Is Wink Bingo fixed?

TheReverendInBlueJeans

Around midday yesterday (19th May) I was playing on Wink Bingo in one of the 5p a game 90 ball bingo rooms. The chat house (AZUL) finished at noon and a different host took over (can't remember which one). In the course of the handover something strange happened. After the first line was won AZUL announced the name of the full house winner. Lo and behold a couple of minutes later the player announced duly won. How did AZUL know who was going to win two minutes before the game ended? Several players (including the winner) questioned how this had happened but as AZUL had logged off at this point we didn't get an answer. It does seem very strange and makes me wonder if the games are rigged or whether the chat hosts have some control over who wins. This would perhaps explain why I never win.

david39

Once all the players are logged in and the "balls" are set, as in any bingo game, the winner is already decided. The computer knows immediately which card has won because the sequence of numbers, although not yet called, is known to it.

Even before the first number has been called, the computer will have run through all the cards and established which one has won and could declare the winner at that point.
It only goes through the long process of calling each ball individually for the benefit of giving the human players the excitement of possibly winning.

Obviously the caller can also see at the start of the game who has won and in this case accidentally declared it before the game was finished.

It's the same at bingo halls now. If everyone used the new electronic "books" rather than paper ones, the end result of each game could be declared in a moment. Luckily, some of us still prefer dabbers and paper books and, of course, the computer does not know which paper books are actually being played and so cannot check in advance.
Thank goodness - otherwise if they all went electronic - we'd be paying our money, selecting our machine, being told immediately whether we had won or not and then going home five minutes after we had clocked in!

Alias_Omega

Also, if you get disconnected from the internet, the bingo game plays on aswell..

TheReverendInBlueJeans

If the winners are decided in advance then it sounds to me like there's scope for manipulation. There must be a temptation to ensure that regular depositers are kept sweet to ensure that they keep depositing. I only play occasionally and spend very little so perhaps there's no incentive to let me win from time to time?

woody01

Of course its rigged.
Its an internet Bingo hall.

Surely you cannot believe this is pure luck.

david39

I am not suggesting that it is actually rigged - that's how Bingo works when you use a computer to generate the 90 numbers randomly.

When numbers were on balls drawn out of a box, then each number came out by chance, the number on each one was unknown until it was drawn - you could not say what the 20th ball would be until after the 19th had been drawn.

With a computer, you can generate the 90 numbers as a random list before the game starts and then ask the computer to reveal them one by one. The difference being that the 20th ball, like all the others in the list, has already been stored in the computer's memory at the start of the game.

In a completely computerised bingo game as is played on-line, then the computer can almost instantly work out which of the players has won before even the first number is revealed. This must have been what happened at Wink Bingo and the information was relayed to the caller long before the game was over - presumably to give him time to think of something witty or personal to say to the winner.

This does not mean the game is necessarily rigged, as hopefully the compilation and allocation of the "cards" is entirely random as well. It only becomes rigged if the computer works out the winning card before the start and allocates it to a specific player - or even allocates it to a ficticious player so that the operators of the game keep the whole of the stake!

zepplinman

from personal experience theres an element of unfairness to the online bingo sites, played for about 3 years and i can afford it but now i've found a pattern to the winners always winning over and over again dont matter when u play its the same winners all the time... i have played gala on line for a long time and have recently noticed that theres a pattern to the winners names beginning with letters a, b, c,d, e, m... meaning me and many others have no chance and they call it fair.... tickets are suppose to be issued by the radom number generator and its automatic, it maybe but it dosnt mean someone has programmed it and targeting high spenders. they say its not fixed but only recently a gala club in sunderland was under investigation for fiddling with system were the manager set his girlfriends ticket to win the £10,000 jactpot, so if he can do it who else can... i'm not writing as a sore loser but it should be fair to all, i recently complained to the managing director of gala pointing out this pattern of winning names as i have noticed even upto the last six weeks and i would say about 85 per cent of the winners names began with the above intials.......... hence no reply or explanation but they have blocked my account and i cant access the site, so what have they got to hide.... been watching on a friends pc and the same patern of winners is still happening winning all the full house and big money games... avoid gala like the plague.....

zppp

woody01 wrote: »

Of course its rigged.
Its an internet Bingo hall.

Surely you cannot believe this is pure luck.

TheReverendInBlueJeans wrote: »

If the winners are decided in advance then it sounds to me like there's scope for manipulation. There must be a temptation to ensure that regular depositers are kept sweet to ensure that they keep depositing. I only play occasionally and spend very little so perhaps there's no incentive to let me win from time to time?

Don't know if the Gambling Commission would agree as the regulator.

malkie76

that's how Bingo works when you use a computer to generate the 90 numbers randomly.

Computers inherently cannot actually generate random numbers. They can generate a string of numbers which 'appear' random, but they are purely following coding instructions.
You should probably have that in your mind when playing any online betting game.