Bingo

In a past article, we discussed how you must browse the licensing requirements for bingos in your state and determine a tough notion of how many bingo players will undoubtedly be attendance. Now let's look at building your bingo event's bingo program and determining your bingo prize payouts. Bingo

Bingo games may differ on structure and prize payout based on location, crowd size, and most importantly, the chairperson. Even within the same city, different bingo games may differ tremendously.

Building Your Bingo Program

A normal bingo game structure consists of some early games ("Early Bird"), the main body of games ("Regular Games"), and various jackpot or special games throughout.

Early bird games

The first bird games are generally a number of games (3-5) played before the regular games begin. Often, faster paced than regular games, they are played on separate bingo game books from the regular game books. Payouts are generally modest and roughly just like standard (non-jackpot) games in the regular game books. It is not essential that you include early bird games in your bingo program.

Regular & special (jackpot) games

The normal & special games begin after the first bird games have finished or in the beginning of one's bingo program (if you've no early bird games). Played on multiple sheet game books, they are the main event of the bingo program, and usually include 6-10 games played on 6 or 9 face (faces are individual bingo plays) sheets. The normal game books include bingos of varying payouts, including a number of special (jackpot or more paying) games.

Note: Some bingos take away the special (or jackpot) games from their regular game bingo books and play them on separate special (or jackpot) bingo books.

Now let's look at determining your bingo prize payouts.

Determining Your Bingo Prize Payouts

For nonprofit groups that have your bingo prizes donated, determining your prize payouts can be easy. You simply take the prizes donated, divide them up in smaller value items for many regular games and bigger value items for the special or jackpot games. However, if you are awarding cash prizes based on your bingo players'attendance and spending levels, you need to ensure that you're budgeting appropriately.

For example, if you plan on 100 bingo players attending your bingo event, how much do you anticipate each player to spend on bingo books? Perhaps, you're limiting sales to 1 bingo book per player and charging $10.00 per book. This implies you are able to expect $1,000.00 in revenue to pay prizes with.

So, in the above example, when you yourself have a bingo program with 10 regular games and 3 of these are specials (jackpots), you never want to pay out $100 and $300 for the jackpots (for an overall total of $1,600.00). Instead, maybe you award say $40 for the regular games and $150 for the specials (for an overall total of $730).

Your bingo prize payouts should be considered a delicate balance between the revenue you hope to acquire and prize payouts that may keep your bingo players happy. A great guideline is to attempt to have bingo prizes totaling 75% of bingo revenue.

Note: In the above example, bingo book prices and bingo prize payouts aren't necessarily located in reality. As we said before, bingo games, prices, and prizes may differ dramatically from area to area. Bingo.com

Also, in the above example, some groups limit bingo paper sales to manage inventory and keep things equal between players. Limiting sales may or may not be the best thing depending on your own crowd. When you yourself have mostly novice bingo players who are there more to guide the charity than to play bingo, this may be a good strategy.

However, if you're crowd consists of several regular bingo players, you then will undoubtedly be better off not limiting spending, both from the sales standpoint and from the bingo player satisfaction standpoint. Regular bingo players don't wish to be limited on the number of bingo books they can play.