If most of your bingo-playing experiences have been spent in your local bingo hall or a similar physical location, you may never have heard of 50-Ball bingo! For example, many British players had never seen 75-Ball bingo before the emergence of online bingo rooms; likewise, American bingo fans were able to benefit from our preferred 90-Ball game when online bingo first became available across the pond. 50-Ball is different, however: this game was brand new to bingo players worldwide when it first appeared sometime during the early 21st century.

Playing bingo in person requires you to mark the numbers on your cards/tickets manually. This naturally limits the number of tickets one person can reasonably keep up with during a single game. Online bingo removes this limitation by marking off your numbers automatically, as they are called, enabling you to play as many cards as you are permitted to purchase. 50-Ball is just one of many varieties of bingo that you can play online – the popular 90-Ball and 75-Ball variants are, of course, widely available, but there are also 30-Ball, 40-Ball, and 80-Ball games to explore as well!

50 ball bingo sites bonuses

We already have an extensive catalogue of 50-Ball bingo games in our library but continue to add more with each passing week. If you have a particular favourite 50-Ball game that you feel is worthy of our attention, please don’t hesitate to let us know – we’re always keen to hear which games our readers enjoy the most. Oh, and don’t worry if 50-Ball is not your game of choice! We also list all the best 90, 80, 75, 40, and 30-Ball bingo titles on our dedicated page to different styles of bingo games.

The rules of 50-ball bingo are as follows:

• Purchase your bingo tickets/cards – there may be a minimum or maximum number of tickets permitted for purchase in each different 50-Ball bingo game.

• The game begins with an announcer repeatedly calling out random numbers between one and fifty. The announcer may be a computer-generated voice, or it may be a well-known personality, such as in the case of Deal or No Deal Bingo which Noel Edmonds narrates.

• If the announcer calls out a number which appears on one or more of your cards, the game will automatically mark these off on your behalf. If you successfully mark off all the numbers on either of the two rows of one of your tickets, you will win the first prize!

• After a player has completed a full line on one of their tickets, the game will continue until a player manages to mark off all the numbers on an entire ticket. When this occurs, that player will collect the full house prize. 

• If two or more players complete a line or a full ticket simultaneously, the prize will be divided equally between all those involved in the tie.

A 50-Ball bingo card or ticket contains two rows of five numbers each. Unlike a 90-Ball ticket, there are no empty spaces on a 50-Ball bingo ticket. There are also no patterns to try and form, as in 75-Ball or 80-Ball bingo. The tickets do have some similarities with other bingo variants, however, as each of the five columns always contains numbers within a set range. Some 50-Ball tickets will have the word B-I-N-G-O written above these columns, as with a 75-Ball ticket:

• The numbers shown in the first or ‘B’ column range between 1 and 10.
• The numbers shown in the second or ‘I’ column range between 11 and 20.
• The numbers shown in the third or ‘N’ column range between 21 and 30.
• The numbers shown in the four or ‘G’ column range between 31 and 40.
• The numbers shown in the five or ‘O’ column range between 41 and 50.

As a game of pure chance, there are no shortcuts to a quick win when playing 50-ball bingo. However, playing at peak hours can help a little, as the prize pools are larger during these times – you may not win more often, but you will win a lot more when you do! 

Additionally, keep an eye out for 50-Ball games that offer progressive jackpot prizes – not only do these present an opportunity for a huge win, but 50% of these jackpots are often divided between all the players with tickets in the current game as well. Therefore, the more players are participating in the current game, the better your chances are of sharing in a jackpot!

Many 50-Ball bingo games include a progressive jackpot prize on top of the regular payouts for completing a line or full house. A percentage of the purchase price of every ticket goes towards funding the jackpot prize pool, which may be linked to one game, several games, or even multiple games across a network of different online bingo websites. These jackpots can often run into tens of thousands of pounds, making for a very exciting game of bingo!

In most 50-Ball Bingo games that offer a progressive jackpot, the winner will collect 50% of the total, with the remaining 50% divided equally amongst all other players holding one or more tickets for the game where the jackpot is won.

The main advantage of 50-Ball Bingo over the more common 90-Ball and 75-Ball games is that it is a very fast-paced way to play bingo. Fifty balls are obviously close to just half the number used in 90-Ball bingo, so winning combinations tend to be hit extremely quickly by comparison.  This allows players to enjoy many more games during the same amount of time, which, in turn, presents more opportunities to win both the regular prizes and the progressive jackpots.

The original 50-Ball bingo games first appeared at bingo sites running the Virtue Fusion software during the first decade of the 21st century. Since then, many other developers, such as Dragonfish and Cozy Games, have created their own 50-Ball bingo games, and new variants continue to be released each month. However, the game plays very similarly to 40-Ball bingo, which some more prominent developers such as Playtech seem to favour. Only time will tell if the industry is big enough to sustain both variants over the long term.

1. Home
 ›
2. Bingo Games
 ›
3. 50 Ball Bingo