Casino Enterprise Management

If you were to examine today’s broad spectrum of Class II gaming products, you probably would be amazed at the wide variety of devices and systems that are available, all of which have been designed to broaden players’ participation in the bingo experience. This includes electronic devices that can be played within the bingo hall alongside paper bingo cards.

The game of bingo can be traced back to a lottery game called “Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia” that was played in Italy in c.1530. By the 18th century, the game had matured, and in France, playing cards, tokens and the reading out of numbers had been added to it. In the 19th century, bingo was widely used in Germany for educational purposes to teach children spelling, animal names and multiplication tables.

The first playing of bingo in the U.S. was documented to have occurred at a traveling carnival near Atlanta in 1929; “Beano” was being played with dried beans, a rubber stamp and cardboard sheets. A man named Edwin Lowe was watching this game and noticed how engaged the players were. Lowe took the idea with him to New York, where he introduced the game to his friends. He conducted bingo games similar to the ones he had witnessed, using dried beans, a rubber numbering stamp and cardboard. His friends loved the game. It is said that one of his players made bingo history when he was so excited to have won that he yelled out “Bingo!” instead of “Beano!”

The game contained the following fundamental elements:

• There were many players but only one “caller”
• Each player was given cards bearing numbers on the face
• The caller announced a pattern to be achieved
• The caller randomly selected numbers
• The players were in competition with each other to be the first to have a card containing numbers matching the pattern in play

While the “traditional” bingo card is a 5x5 grid with the column headings of B, I, N, G and O with the center square marked FREE, the actual layout of the card is immaterial to the distinctive element of bingo. The facet of the game that separates bingo from virtually all other forms of gaming, including lotteries, keno and casino games, is the fact that the players are competing against each other and the game does not end until there is a winner.

Since bingo’s inception in 1929, there have been many advances in the technologies surrounding the game, but the change with the largest impact was the adoption of bingo as a means to raise money. While the fundamentals of the parlor game Lowe invented remain the same, the means by which the game is played today bear little resemblance. The commercialization of the game required a number of changes, primarily addressing the “integrity” of the game. Once players began wagering, they needed to be assured that the game was being conducted fairly. This promoted the creation of larger “permutations,” or perms, of card faces; the development of machines to randomly select the numbers; and various display mechanisms, including number boards, to keep the players informed of the called numbers. These types of changes can be categorized as “bingo hall equipment” and are ancillary to this discussion but will be germane when revisited later.

The first round of advancements impacting the “player experience” revolved around the physicality of the actual card being played by the player. This included inventions such as magnetic discs to replace the beans and ultimately the creation of “shutter cards” in the 1950s. Shutter cards are cardboard and plastic and incorporate translucent shutters attached to the cards, which are used by the player to cover the called numbers. These advancements, while seemingly being designed simply to ease the play of the game, had a secondary and more important effect. They allowed players to mark the cards faster. Players quickly realized that if they purchased shutter cards rather than the cardboard cards (also known as “hard cards”), the technology would allow them to play more cards, effectively increasing their chances to win. Rather than being able to hear the announced ball and find and cover that number on one or two cards before the next number was announced, the players could cover it on three, four or even more cards. Game operators just as quickly realized that if they could sell the players more cards, they could make more money. Typically the bingo prizes were determined by estimating the number of people attending and multiplying that by the amount each person would spend. This gross sales value would fund the prizes awarded in each game of the series of games on offer, and the operator would retain the balance as profits. Obviously, fluctuations in crowd size could greatly affect the operator’s profit, so anything that would increase the amount an individual person could spend would benefit the profitability of the game.

This highlights another unique aspect of bingo: Because the players are competing against each other to be the first to achieve a pattern, each player is limited to purchasing only the number of cards he or she can effectively play. The player’s wager is directly related to the player’s skill. Any improvement that assists players in marking their cards will, in effect, permit them to increase their wager. The development of technological aids has revolved around this concept of increasing “player spend.”

The development of shutter cards was a great improvement in assisting the players to physically play more cards, but the pinnacle of enhanced playing was achieved with the advent of disposable paper in the 1970s. Disposable bingo paper is still the predominant method of play in use today. Paper bingo faces are printed onto large sheets that are then cut down to smaller sizes and collated into booklets or pads. These pads range in size from single card faces up to sheets of three cards by six (“18-on’s”) or larger. The reason this form of bingo play became so widespread was that by using an ink marker, the player could rapidly mark many card faces within the 8 or 10 seconds between ball calls. This advancement spawned a bingo revolution, including the commercialization of bingo into purpose-built facilities. While hard cards and shutter cards are still played today, the majority of non-electronic bingo is now played on disposable paper sheets.

Even with the increased number of card faces a player could effectively play, there was still a skill-based limit on the maximum number of cards a player could play, with the average player marking fewer than 18 cards per game. As bingo hall equipment became more and more sophisticated, entrepreneurs began to look at incorporating this state-of-the-art technology into the marking of individual bingo cards and thereby assisting the players. These developments parallel the development of computer technology and can basically be broken down into two major types of player interface devices: portable handheld player interface devices and fixed-based networked player interface devices.

Around 1980, there were a couple of portable devices being designed, with the first handheld devices arguably being the Electro-Vision and the Bingo Card Minder. These competitive products utilized printed circuit boards and either LED (light-emitting diodes) or LCD (liquid crystal display) screens. The devices were typical of those of the day, and over the coming decade, many similar devices were developed and marketed. These devices gained increasingly more and more capabilities as manufacturers continued to advance the state of the art, however, it is safe to say that all of these devices effectively played the game of bingo.

From a player’s perspective, these early devices were challenging to use and required hands-on training in order to maximize their acceptance. With these devices, the players were responsible for entering each number as it was called and the device was only capable of displaying a single card, but when a number was entered it would display the “best card” to the player, typically within 2 seconds or less. Upon achieving a bingo, the devices would notify the player through the use of both sound and display.
This first generation portable handset could:

• Store a session of games playing multiple games per load (50 +)
• Store a large quantity of cards for play in each game (100 +)
• Recognize a wide array of “bingo patterns” (200 +)
• Accept and store the input of called balls
• Identify winning patterns based on each game’s pattern

Differentiating features between competitors’ devices would be:

• The specific quantity of cards that could be played by the device on a game-by-game basis. Obviously the more cards a device could play, the more marketable it would be.
• The perm of cards in play, which dictated whether or not the cards on the device could be verified as winning cards on the bingo hall equipment in use in the hall. For the most part, each manufacturer would design and use a proprietary permutation.
• The ease of loading the cards and the bingo program into the devices. Many different strategies were employed to load the devices, including manually entering the card numbers of paper cards sold with the device; preloading purchases onto removable storage cards; and entering activation codes.

While cumbersome and with limited creature comforts, these devices were generally rugged; they were capable of sustaining drops of 5 to 10 feet, were powered by commercially available consumer batteries, and required very little maintenance.

From the late 1980s to the early to mid-1990s, there was a transition to the next generation of handheld devices, pioneered by the proliferation of the microprocessor and the availability of the personal computer. These two factors allowed for enhanced device capabilities and ease-of-use features for the bingo hall operators. This next generation of devices, for the most part, didn’t change the form factor of the devices themselves—they remained battery powered with a single-card LCD display—but they did include such extras as displaying the current game number and the number of balls on the screen. The biggest improvement was the capacity of the devices to play more cards and more games, along with the ability to play enhanced permutations of bingo cards.

These devices, for the most part, were loaded through a direct connection to the point-of-sale computer, and with dynamic RAM memory, the devices were able to have patterns and cards loaded for play at the time of activation. This was a major step forward and allowed for functions like the loading of hall-designed win patterns, allowing the device to adapt to the bingo hall and not the other way around. The change from activating pre-programmed devices to on-site programming of devices spurned the development of sophisticated bingo hall operating systems and computerized the bingo hall.

During the early 1990s, the first networked player station systems were being developed and deployed into bingo halls. These systems utilized mainframe technology, with a central computer controlling the operation of the game. The systems would include player terminals and server systems with point-of-sale terminals, as well as integrated ball blowers. These systems would allow players to sit at terminals and access bingo purchases via an account number. The player would enter the account number and be taken to the current game. All ball calls as made by the caller would be transmitted via the network to the device, and the device would either mark the balls for the player or the player would touch the screen of the device to mark outstanding ball calls. [Note: This level of automation was soon transferred to the handheld devices, and while the first patent issued for a wireless networked card minding device was in 1986, it was the mid-1990s that saw this technology proliferate. By the mid-2000s, virtually all devices being offered supported the wireless transmission of data.]

In the mid-1990s, there was a distinct and seemingly insurmountable separation between the fixed-based systems being used and the handheld devices. This was caused primarily by two key factors: connectivity and computing power. Discounting the differences between centralized and distributed computing and network architecture, it is fair to say that all fixed-based systems being offered had the same characteristics:

• Account Based—Players conducted POS transactions where they were provided account codes for access to purchases; these purchases included both credits and bingo products.
• Credit Management—The systems provided cash accounting on both the system and the terminal, allowing for the redeeming of credits for gaming opportunities and the awarding of credits in lieu of cash prizes.
• Variety of Games—Systems could provide live bingo games along with an assortment of other games, including keno, slots, blackjack and poker.

• Touchscreen Interface—Players primarily interacted with the devices through a touchscreen interface.

Since the mid-1990s, fixed-based systems have maintained these features but have not added to them to any great extent. Novelty features such as “chat” applications or live TV were added by the manufacturers, but for the most part, the core gaming functionality of fixed-based systems was achieved by the mid-1990s.

This was not true of the handheld systems. In comparison, the industry-standard portable card minding device of the mid-1990s had the following attributes:

• Fixed Screen Display—Devices provided for the display of a single card through the use of LCD segmented displays, similar to the display found on calculators.
• Manual Control—Devices required the player to navigate through the occasion programs (sessions) and manually enter each ball as it was called.
• Product Downloads Only—The devices were connected to the POS system and were downloaded with bingo cards, patterns and the game schedule.
• Stand-Alone Device—Once disconnected from the system, the device operated autonomously.

As you can see, there was quite a gulf between the devices’ capabilities from both the player’s and the hall’s perspective. From a bingo standpoint, however, each type of device had similar capabilities: Each device type could play a multitude of patterns and could simultaneously play hundreds of bingo cards. This device compatibility was evidenced by the number of locations that would utilize both fixed-based and portable devices at the same time. The major impediment to the widespread adoption of fixed-based devices was the cost of the equipment, coupled with the inherent need to have the devices connected to both a network and power. This is the primary reason that the fixed-based devices were limited to locations that had dedicated facilities, such as casinos, commercial bingo operators and Indian tribes.

It was also during this period of time, the mid- to late-1990s, that it became common to see PCs in use as POS devices for both fixed-based devices and handsets. While manufacturers continued to work on smaller incremental advancements for fixed-based systems, the state of the art was more rapidly developing for handset manufacturers.

Handheld PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) were a new but popular item in the mid-1990s, and around 1997, Apple took it a step further by introducing the Newton, which used a touchscreen instead of a keypad and also offered handwriting recognition. PDAs were battery powered devices that ran on embedded operating systems, which allowed application programmers a more productive development environment than previous generations of products. The PDA operating systems also offered a more complete graphical software subsystem, allowing developers to create full-screen, PC-style graphics. For quite some time these graphics were restricted to monochrome screens, but eventually the ever-increasing power of the microprocessor, coupled with the lowering cost of color screens, permitted one of the seminal moments in handset design: the incorporation of an active matrix color screen.

The first such screen was introduced to the bingo marketplace in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most manufacturers had a color-capable screen. These types of devices represented a large step forward in delivering an enhanced player experience. The new color screens allowed for:

• Specialty Games—The types of games played on paper in a bingo hall included such games as Double Action (two numbers in a square) and Lucky Star (one space designated as special) that could not be played on segmented LCD displays. Now, for the first time, all of the games being played in the hall could be played on the portable devices.
• Flashboard Displays—Geographically correct flashboards allowed players to double check the numbers they had entered.
• Alternate Gaming Content—Players could play card games such as solitaire on their bingo device.

These capabilities, while mainly promoted as differentiating features of competitive products, started bridging the gap between portable devices and fixed-based devices from the players’ perspective. The portable devices were now able to provide entertainment value to the players and assist them in the play of their paper games. The device would present to the player each game in the correct order, including the geometry and color of the paper in play.

Within a few years of the advent of the color screen, the proliferation of radio-based data transmissions overtook the industry. By 2003, the majority of manufacturers had added the ability to broadcast game information from the site system to the handsets. This was a great leap forward in the operation of a bingo hall, as it provided the players with portable devices capable of automatically receiving ball calls, marking bingo cards and informing players of winning bingos. Previously this level of automation was only available on fixed-based devices. The primary mechanism utilized for the broadcast of game information was RF (radio frequency) technology. This is a one-way transmission of information and the devices were still required to be connected to the system for downloading. The types of information sent to the devices included:

• Game Navigation—Allows the device to be synchronized to the current game in play.
• Ball Call—Keep the player current with all called balls.
• Bingo Pattern—Ensures the device is playing the correct pattern.

The interesting thing about these devices is that they can now be given to novice bingo players and be utilized to teach them how to play bingo, whereas when handsets were first introduced it was experienced bingo players who utilized the devices. When evaluated from an educational perspective, the novice is presented with a device that will automatically advance from game to game, keeping pace with the bingo caller. This includes displaying the correctly colored paper and also displaying an animated pattern board that advises the player as to what the winning pattern is. The player is always presented with the best cards, with the best pattern highlighted on each card. The ball calls are processed automatically, ensuring that the player does not miss any bingos. For the first time, this level of assistance provides a novice player with the assurance that their wager is not jeopardized by their lack of ability and, in fact, permits them the same opportunity to win that the experienced player has always enjoyed. If you remember, the key element of bingo is to be the first player to hold a card with the winning pattern on it. Prior to this level of automation, players could actually miss a bingo and, depending on the rules in play, potentially forfeit their claim on the prize.

The final advancement in electronic bingo that brings us to today’s technology is the convergence of portable handsets and fixed-based player terminals. The merging of these two types of devices resulted from the proliferation of portable computers, primarily triggered by the widespread adoption of secure wireless networks technology. While some handset manufacturers already had two-way communications between their portable devices and their site systems, it wasn’t until the last three to four years that we’ve seen the widespread use of tablet devices. These devices are true hybrids between portable devices and fixed-based devices, providing the best features of both.

Modern bingo tablets are not off-the-shelf laptops, but rather sophisticated proprietary devices capable of withstanding rigorous continual use in a bingo hall. The devices are spill resistant, can withstand drops of several feet and are battery powered, typically running for more than 12 hours between charges.

Common features of the modern bingo handsets are:

• Color Touchscreen Displays—While display sizes vary among devices, the elimination of the keypad provides a new level of flexibility when designing software for tablets.
• Two-Way Communications—This is integral to credit management and changes the paradigm of POS counter sales. Additionally, automatic calling and bingo verification allows for instant bingo games.
• Credit Management—Account-based product sales coupled with spontaneous purchase opportunities allow players to re-spend their winnings. This allows bingo operators to capitalize by providing their customers with multiple purchase opportunities.
• Secondary Game Libraries—Pull tabs, instant bingo and raffles are some of the Class II games that can now be offered on portable devices. In addition, these devices can also support the play of Class III products like keno, slots, blackjack and video poker.

The advancements that have been made to “technological aids to the game of bingo” over the last several decades have clearly kept pace with the general advancements made in computer technologies. Modern player interface devices are becoming platform independent in that the actual device is becoming less important, forcing manufacturers to differentiate their product offerings by focusing on the content being provided. An increasingly sophisticated player base will require the next generation of devices to be capable of far more than just bingo play, and given the prevalence of features such as entertainment games, TV and chat, you could argue that today’s devices are already there.



One of the industry’s foremost experts in electronic bingo, Mark Newton began his gaming career with Video King in 1998. As the current chairman of the Electronic Bingo Manufacturers’ Association, he is a regular speaker at G2E, Bingo World and NAGRA trade shows. His opinion is sought by legislators, regulators and industry peers.