who is in it The size of the room is part of the price. A ticket in a room of sixty is worth more than the same ticket in a room of two hundred and forty, because the prize is shared among fewer people. The ticket page works through that arithmetic, including the part it does not change.
Bingo Desk / Overview
The room, and the prize in it
A prize that depends on who else is in the room
Nearly every gambling product quotes a price and settles against it. A bingo room does something else: it sells tickets into a round that several hundred other people are also buying into, and the prize is either a stated share of what the room sold or a fixed sum the operator has promised regardless. That is the whole subject of this desk - the ticket, the round, the three ways a prize can be fixed, and the hour a player actually pays for.
Room ticket
- Sheet
- BD-56-01
- Subject
- The room and its prize
- Ways a prize is fixed
- share / floor / fixed sum
- Paid per
- a round, inside an hour
A share4 room types: the prize is a stated percentage of the tickets sold in the round
A floor1 room type: a share with a guaranteed minimum the operator adds to
A fixed sum3 room types: a printed prize the operator owes whatever the room sold
- 90-ball room, prize a share of the roundFifteen numbers on the card, a full house at fifty calls, and a full house paid as a percentage of what the room sold70% of salesthe room carries it
- 75-ball room, prize a shareFive-by-five cards and pattern prizes - a row, a column, a shape - each a slice of the same percentage65% of salesthe room carries it
- 30-ball speed room, prize a shareNine numbers and nine calls: the fastest cadence in the lobby, the smallest share, and the highest cost per hour55% of salesthe room carries it
- Linked-jackpot roomA reduced in-round prize whose takings contribute per ticket to a network pool paid on a coverall inside a call windowshare less a contributionthe room carries it
- Guaranteed-prize roomA printed sum paid whether or not the room filled; below the break-even ticket count the operator funds the differencefixed sumthe operator carries it
- Coverall rollover roomA fixed sum that grows by carrying a tied round forward instead of splitting it between two winnersfixed sum + carry-inthe operator carries it
- Gated "free" roomNo ticket price at all, open only to players who bought into the cash rooms inside a stated period - the gate is the pricefixed small prizesthe operator carries it
- Guaranteed-minimum roomA share with a floor underneath it: below a stated ticket count the winner is paid the minimum and the operator adds the rest70% with a floora floor is carried
Read the verdict column before the room. Eight room types, four whose prize is a share of the tickets sold in that round, three that pay a fixed sum the operator owes whether or not the room filled, and one that is a share with a guaranteed minimum underneath it. The column is what a player can act on: a share punishes a quiet room, a fixed sum makes the room's size irrelevant to the prize, and a floor is the only one of the three where a handful of players at three in the morning are protected from a handful of players' worth of prize.
Direct answerA bingo room sells tickets into a shared round. The prize is one of three things: a share of the money the round took (a percentage of the tickets sold), a share with a guaranteed minimum underneath it, or a fixed sum the operator promises whether or not the room filled. Two players finishing on the same call normally share the prize or send it to a rollover, and the player's real cost is per hour rather than per round.
A ticket is a chance in a round, not a betThe prize is a share or a sumThe room's size sets the shareThe hour is the unit of cost
Why a desk about rooms exists at all
The other desks in this series read the machinery around a wager: the rail a deposit travels on, the condition a bonus carries, the maths inside a slot, the exchange that prices a bet against a bet, the pool that pays a dividend on a race. This one reads a product where the number of people in the room is part of the price. Nothing else in the series behaves quite that way, and it produces the questions readers actually ask: why the prize in the same room changes every hour, why two winners came up on the same call, and why the ticket that costs ten pence seems to cost four pounds by the end of the evening.
It matters because the room is sold as a social product rather than as an arm's-length one. A player sits in a room, hears a host, watches the board fill, and the round starts every few minutes whether anybody is watching or not. That cadence is the part the ticket price hides, and it is why the cost of the hour is a page in this desk rather than a footnote.
Three ways a prize can be fixed, in one strip
Every room in this desk is placed in one of three families, and the strip below the header carries the same three labels as the ladder further down. The family decides who carries the risk that the room did not fill.
share A share of the round
The prize is a stated percentage of the money the round took in. Sell more tickets and the prize grows; sell fewer and it shrinks. The operator keeps the difference between the percentage and the whole, so the operator's revenue is a fixed slice of whatever happened.
floor A share with a guaranteed floor
The same share, with a minimum underneath it that the operator pays if the room underfilled. This is the family that puts the operator's own money in the room: below a certain number of tickets, the prize is bigger than the money taken.
fixed sum A sum the operator carries
The prize is a stated figure that does not move with the room's size. A quiet room and a full room pay the same, so the operator carries the whole risk of an underfilled round - and prices that risk into the ticket and into the expectation over many rounds.
What the room decides before anything else
Four consequences follow from the structure of a room, and each one is a page in this desk.
room 1
room 2
what fills the gap Somebody carries the underfill. Under a share the room carries it - the prize simply falls. Under a floor or a fixed sum the operator carries it, and no operator carries a risk for free. The prize page separates the three families.
room 3
what happens on a tie The same call can produce two winners. Two tickets can complete the pattern on the same number, and the room's rule then either splits the prize or rolls it into the next round. The numbers page prices both outcomes.
room 4
what the hour costs A round is minutes, not an evening. Rounds start on a clock, so the ticket price is a rate rather than a stake. The hour page turns tickets into an hourly figure, which is the only number that can be compared with anything else.
How to read the room ladder
The call board above is this desk's first signature component: eight room types, each asked one question - how is the prize fixed, and who carries the risk that the room did not fill. Four of the eight pay a share of the tickets sold in the round, one pays a share with a guaranteed floor underneath it, and three pay a fixed sum that the operator owes whether or not anybody turned up.
Read the verdict column before the room. The verdict is what a player can act on: a share punishes a quiet room and rewards a busy one, a floor removes the worst case for the winner and puts it on the operator, and a fixed sum makes the room's size irrelevant to the prize while making the operator's exposure the thing being priced.
What the room ledger shows
The room ledger at the foot of this page follows four rooms from the money taken in a single round to the money that left it, and the arithmetic is deliberately uncomfortable: on two of the four rows the operator pays out more than the round took in, because one room was guaranteed and one was carrying a rollover from a round that is not in the table.
That is the honest shape of the product. Over a long run the operator's slice covers the guarantees and the rollovers; round by round it does not, and a player who reads four rounds of a lobby can see a payout ratio well above the share the tickets are sold on without anybody behaving badly.
Worked example - the same ticket in two rooms (illustrative)
Ticket price: 0.10
Room A sold 60 tickets in the round; Room B sold 240 tickets
Prize rule in both rooms: 70% of the money the round took
Room A: 60 x 0.10 = 6.00 taken; 70% = 4.20 to the winner
Room B: 240 x 0.10 = 24.00 taken; 70% = 16.80 to the winner
Chance that the win lands on one particular ticket, all else equal: 1 ticket in 60 = 1.67%; 1 in 240 = 0.42%
Expected value of one 0.10 ticket, before any consideration of patterns:
Room A: 4.20 x (1 / 60) = 0.070
Room B: 16.80 x (1 / 240) = 0.070
The two rooms pay the same in expectation, which is the point of the page rather than a curiosity: a bigger prize and a bigger room cancel out exactly, and the number that changes is the variance rather than the value.
The three questions a room's own page answers
A room is described on a page inside the lobby, and three things on it decide everything a player can act on. The checklist page turns this into a list to run in a couple of minutes.
- How is the prize fixed? A stated percentage, a guaranteed minimum, or a fixed sum. The room's own page ordinarily says which, and where the prize is a share it usually says the percentage.
- Which patterns pay, and how much? One line, two lines and a full house are three prizes in the same round, and their values are set from the same pot. A room that pays a large one-line prize is a room whose full house is smaller.
- How many tickets does the room allow? Some rooms cap the tickets per player per round, and the cap matters more to the room's economics than to the player's chances, because it is what stops a full house being bought outright.
Where the numbers in this desk come from. Every ticket price, ticket count, percentage, prize and payout figure here is labelled illustrative and shows its arithmetic, so it can be re-derived. Real rooms differ in price, in the share they pay, in the patterns they set, in whether the prize is guaranteed and in how they treat a tie, and they change. What does not change is the structure: tickets sold into a shared round, a prize fixed by a published rule, a rule for the same call, and a round that starts again on a clock.
If you only read one page
The hour page is the practical one: it turns a ticket price into a rate, which is the number a player can actually decide with. The prize page is the one that explains why two rooms selling the same ticket at the same price can pay out very differently, and the checklist reduces the whole desk to eight questions to ask of a room before buying into it.
| The room | Tickets | Taken | Paid out | Arithmetic | Net |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 90-ball share room | 240 | 24.00 | 16.80 | 240 x 0.10 = 24.00; 24.00 x 0.70 = 16.80 | +7.20 |
| Guaranteed-prize room | 120 | 12.00 | 15.00 | 120 x 0.10 = 12.00; prize fixed at 15.00 | -3.00 |
| Rollover room | 180 | 18.00 | 25.20 | 180 x 0.10 = 18.00; 18.00 x 0.70 = 12.60; + 12.60 carried in | -7.20 |
| Jackpot-linked room | 300 | 30.00 | 12.00 | 300 x 0.10 = 30.00; 12.00 paid; 1.00 to the linked jackpot | +17.00 |
| Four rounds | 840 | 84.00 | 69.00 | paid to players + 1.00 into the linked jackpot | +14.00 |
84.00 taken, 69.00 paid to players, 1.00 into a linked jackpot, 14.00 retained. That is 83.3% of the takings paid out across four rounds - and on two of the rows the operator paid out more than the round took in, once because a prize was guaranteed and once because a rollover was carried in from a round that is not in this table. Both facts are true at once: a single round is a sample, the payout ratio of four rounds is a slightly larger sample, and neither is the room's long-run figure.