Anyone who is fond of a wager has a wider range of options than ever, thanks to online casinos, sports betting providers, lotteries, and more. As legal reform continues to spread across the US, more states are opening their own regulated online betting ecosystems. For the rest, offshore platforms are eager to offer their services.
The online betting industry generates well over $50 billion in annual global revenue, and that figure rises by more than 11 percent per year. This is partially through enhanced web access and new markets that are opening up but also by coming up with innovative products. One that has had plenty of attention and been marketed heavily over the past year is blackout bingo. Is it worth a try, or is it just an over-hyped flash in the pan?
The reinvention of bingo
10 years ago, bingo was associated with elderly people in church halls or care homes. It was a distraction to keep octogenarians entertained and mentally stimulated or perhaps to raise money for a local community cause. Then in around 2017, online bingo games started to appear, hosted both by specialist providers and by some online casinos. At the same time, the big bingo brands started to invest heavily in marketing. Names like Heather Graham and Nicole Scherzinger were suddenly the faces of bingo companies.
Clearly, bingo was seeking to appeal to a younger audience, and it worked. Online bingo games have become popular across a far broader age range among casual gamblers.
Blackout bingo
Blackout bingo represents the next step in this reinvention. It was launched in 2019 by Big Run Studios, the same developer who created Big Run Solitaire and Big Cooking. It is free to download for iOS and Android and is available from the app stores.
In brief, Blackout Bingo provides a platform to play bingo in real-time against other players. You can either play for the in-game currency of z-coins, or you can deposit real money into your account and play to win cash games.
Is it worth it?
On the plus side, Blackout Bingo is well-designed with a simple user interface. It is hassle-free to download, and for anyone who is completely new to bingo, the practice games are good fun and will help familiarize you with how to play bingo.
However, when we get to the real money games, things start to fall down. If you are serious about real money gambling online, there are US casino sites out there that offer better real money bingo games – and, of course, plenty of other casino games too. It’s hard going trying to win any real money at blackout bingo, and the bonuses are frustrating as you have to be a super-regular attendee to get anything from them.
Blackout bingo definitely has its fun side, and if you’re a complete bingo novice, it is as good a way into the game as any. But if you get serious about bingo, you will soon want to graduate to a more serious platform.
