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Technology Comes to the Bingo Industry

One major casino on the Las Vegas Strip is going to cash in on bingo this year. In November, Paris Las Vegas will host "The World Championship of Bingo," with $1.25 million in prize money. The championship game will offer a $1 million grand prize, a prize organizers call the first-ever million-dollar bingo pot ever offered in Las Vegas. The travel package sells for $1,499.

The prize is far more sizable than anything seen at Las Vegas neighborhood casinos, but one concept is very similar. While the game will be held on one day -- Nov. 28 -- the travel package includes a three-night stay at Paris or Bally's, leaving ample time for bingo players to gamble on higher-hold games.

The locals casinos of Las Vegas are well aware of the reasons why many players love the electronic marking devices. It's a simple mathematical proposition - a player capable of playing several dozen cards at once has a far better chance of winning than a six-card player.

To prevent paper players from being put at an overwhelming disadvantage, most Las Vegas halls limit electronic players to 24 cards per device, Smallman said. To get around this, many players purchase additional paper cards.

Though most bingo is played outside of Las Vegas, small charities can't offer the kind of prizes a Las Vegas casino can. To overcome this disadvantage, bingo suppliers are turning to networked games.

"There's a lot of potential (for computer networking) in the bingo hall," Joe Valandra of BK Entertainment of Minneapolis said. "Charities are small, and prizes are limited by (game) size. When you can link the games together, you can really increase the prizes."

Valandra said his company is working on a variety of ways to link games across the country and the world. Such methods include the Internet, satellite broadcasts and high-speed telecommunications lines.

A Tulsa, Oklahoma, company that was at last month's Bingo World convention has been doing this since 1989. Twice a night from its Tulsa headquarters, Multimedia Games broadcasts a national bingo game to 40 different tribal bingo halls. Players who can successfully cover their cards in less than 50 numbers are invited to come to Tulsa, where they spin a wheel for their ultimate prize. The top prize on the wheel is $1 million.

But tribal casinos don't hold round-the-clock games. To give bingo players a chance to play whenever they like, Multimedia introduced a network of interconnected bingo machines in 1996.

Today, Multimedia has 4,000 machines installed at 87 different tribal locations, all connected by a frame relay computer network. Players can jump in on a game literally any time they like, and the game plays until a player wins the parimutuel pool. Tribes receive a cut of the proceeds.

These concepts caused Multimedia to delve into Internet bingo. In December, it spun off GameBay.com, a Los Angeles-based Internet bingo site -- and the early results of the venture show many Internet users are big bingo fans as well.

Since many states prohibit online wagering, players don't wager on GameBay. Instead, said founder Daniel Sarnoff, GameBay visitors play for free, competing for cash or prizes of their choosing -- and GameBay derives its revenues from delivering advertising to these players.

The players' choices of prizes helps the site target its advertising with great effectiveness. If a player decides to play for a steak dinner, for example, the player might see advertisements for steak sauce.

"What you play determines what ads you see," Sarnoff said.

The concept is working well by the standards most important to Internet companies. Though the site is far from profitable, GameBay delivers about 150 million ads per month. Its traffic has increased 11 times over the past four months, Sarnoff said. An average of 2,000 players participate in each of the 470 daily games.

Perhaps most significantly, players stick around for a long time. The average visitor stays at the site for nearly 75 minutes at a time, a length nearly unheard of on the Internet, Sarnoff claims.

"We're the second stickiest site on the Internet, next to CNN.com," Sarnoff said.

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