Online Bingo is obviously a new version of this much loved game, and even bingo halls are a fairly new invention.

The game of bingo is much longer in the tooth, dating back to the 16th century. It reached the States in the late 1920s, and was originally named 'Beano', as you had to mark off the numbers on your cards with dried beans (allegedly!), but it became known as Bingo when someone, when they won, lost their cool and yelled out 'Bingo!' instead of 'Beano'. From that moment on, the name stuck.

Bingo surged in popularity in The States and by the 1930s the game was used as a method to raise money for charities, (as is still the case in the USA today).

In the UK, Bingo became very popular in the swinging sixties, when the Gaming Act passed by Parliament in that year allowed Bingo to be played in Bingo clubs. Eric Morley, who started Miss World competition, introduced Bingo into the UK from the US, and the game has never looked back since.

Across the UK many theatres, cinemas and dancehalls were converted into Bingo Halls, giving the venues quite a theatrical feel: somewhere to go for a real night out. Whereas in the US clubs drew numbers from a bag - in the UK, the whole game became more of a show and glass containers with fan blowers were used to blow numbered ping-pong balls about: this was used to select the numbers. These were subsequently replaced by the more random electronic Random Number Generators (or the RNG) during the following decade, but the culture of theatre still persists.

Online Bingo is just the latest development in British Bingo: playing bingo games at home on the internet in your pyjamas is becoming a very popular pastime and a good way of meeting new pals online. Bingos.co.uk and Mecca Bingo led the way with British 90-ball games, called at speeds that were attuned to the UK market. Now many companies from Virgin to Ladbrokes offer online bingo games that are in some cases better than those played in bingo halls.

The Interent has enabled sites to network huge bingo jackpots running into hundreds of thousands and even millions of pounds. The only difficulty? That´s choosing the best bingo site, and that´s why we hope the reviews on onlineBingoKing help you make an informed decision and pick the best bingo site for you!