BINGO IN THE PHILIPPINES
Bingo is perhaps one of the best-loved games of all time, especially among Filipinos. From family gatherings to church socials, from fiestas to funerals, school reunions to club sorties, from rural towns to shopping malls – whatever the occasion or wherever the place, you could find people of all ages and social status enjoying a friendly bingo session.
Bingo itself has a very interesting beginning. In 1929, American Edwin Lowe discovered the game at an Atlanta carnival. The game was called beano because beans were used to cover numbers on
the playing cards. Lowe later coined and patented the name “BINGO.” Since then, it became a popular pastime in America and Europe.
However, bingo started much earlier than that. In fact, the game was played more than four centuries ago in Italy. It was originally called Lo Guioco del Lotto d’Italia and unlike today’s bingo cards, which uses numbers 1 to 75, the lotto cards ran from 1 to 90 and had five letters representing names of Italian cities.
By the late 1700’s, bingo was being played in France in a form similar to the game we know today, with playing cards, tokens, and numbers read aloud.
Bingo, Pinoy-style
Although it isn’t public knowledge how bingo found its way to Philippine shores, Filipinos have been enjoying this game for ages. In the traditional way of playing bingo, callers pick small chips bearing different number-letter combinations from bottle-shaped baskets made of rattan or plastic. Each number-letter combination is read aloud. You know you’ve won when the numbers you’ve marked on your card match the pattern determined before the game.
To add a Pinoy twist to the game,callers came up with brainteasers when reading the numbers. For example: “sa letrang I, dalawang madreng nakaluhod” for I-22; “sweetna sweet” for the number 16 and “isang buntis” for the number 5, among other similarly creative and humorous phrases.
Today, the game is played in bigger venues with electronic flash boards showing the patterns to be followed and the numbers that are called. The number-letter combinations are picked from marked balls rotated in a cage or a blower, just like picking numbers in the lotto game.
The business of bingo
Bingo’s steady following in the country prompted the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (PAGCOR), the government agency tasked to oversee games of chance, to bring the game to its casinos.
PAGCOR organizes Bingo Fiestas at big venues such as the World Trade Center and have prizes that include brand new cars and a cash jackpot worth P2 million. An innovation to the game is the Instant Charity Bingo, which is a scratch card bingo game that has a jackpot of P1 million.
Proceeds of the games support charitable institutions such as halfway homes for streetchildren and abused women, centers for the elderly and the disabled and other humanitarian groups.
In the last few years, the popularity of the bingo game gave private operators the idea to set up bingocenters in the shopping malls and other commercial areas.
To protect the bingo players from unscrupulous operators, PAGCOR started regulating commercial bingo games by issuing grants of authority to the private operators.
With the advent of video games, PCs, Internet and other advancements in gaming technology it seems bingo is up against tight competition. But if you ask bingo fanatics, bingo is— without doubt — here to stay.
(From Ugnayan newsletter)