Anita's Bingo Blog

The Blockbusters comeback continues to throw up surprises. The first was that it was to be an adults only enterprise, originally having been a show featuring older school children and aimed at them too.

The second comes today in the news that it is Simon Mayo that has been awarded the presenters role, even though there are the enormous shoes of original host, the late Bob Holness, to fill.

Simon Mayo is best known as a radio DJ, originally on Radio 1 and currently hosting the Radio 2 Drivetime show.His past attempts at TV have not been that successful.

While there are tried and trusted presenters that might have been given the job, Simon has proved a hit with the Radio 2 audience and it is judged that the time is right to try TV again.

The new Blockbusters show will air on Challenge TV in the next couple of months and there may even be a celebrity version eventually.

The publicity will certainly not do any harm to Mecca Bingo, who have the exclusive rights to the fast paced and unique Blockbusters Bingo Game. Check it out at Mecca Bingo and if joining for the first time get a 100% cash match worth up to £50 to play.

I always loved Blockbusters as a kid and I hope that Simon can do it justice – he certainly has a hard act to follow, even if the show is not being aired on the mainstream TV channels in the first instance.

WhichBingoAnita

How often have we visited an online bingo site to take part in an offer that we thought was going to be out of this world, only to find that the prize we are being offered is 10BBs, or even worse, only 2BBs, in exchange for our valuable time and cash?

I know that bingo sites can’t afford to give away enormous amounts of cash every day of the year, but these ones are just seriously disappointing. However, how about the bingo sites that have some great games, but aren’t shouting about them in their promotions pages.

That is what is happening at many sites on the Dragonfish network of sites. Now, I can get a bit bored trying to find something different to say about these sites and it is nice when some come along that go out of their way to try and add to the offer – Red Carpet Bingo, Brits Bingo and Bingo in the Sun are a few that spring to mind as trying to bring something extra to the platform.

However, it has recently become clear that the Dragonfish promotion page is somewhat out of date. It tells us that its sites offer a single £100 guaranteed jackpot game at 8.45pm each night, when if fact there are now five £100 guaranteed games every night. That’s a big difference and at just 10p a ticket isn’t a winning opportunity that I would want to miss and wouldn’t want you to either.

I am very surprised at an organisation as big and influential as Dragonfish allowing something like this to slip under the net. However, you can rely on me and WhichBingo to steer you in the right direction.

This undersell of the offer has escaped me for a while as I am suffering from being blocked from many of these sites just like many other readers, so I rely on the promotions pages to allow me pass on what is available. It is only since some of the new bingo sites have been allowing me access that this anomaly has come to light, but it is certainly one that needs putting right asap.

WhichBingoAnita

Jackpotjoy Bingo has always been known for its big jackpots and how often they are won and just recently surpassed even its own expectations and reached a massive milestone by giving away a massive £10 million in one single day. This is the same as £121 being won every second of the day and £7,298 every minute at Jackpotjoy.

With so much money being given away in such a short period of time at a single bingo site is it any wonder that people keep going back again and again. Of course, by doing this they get to know each other and the chat hosts and by playing so much their names are bound to keep appearing, just by the law of averages.

This level of prize money being available in a singe 24 hour period is very attractive to new players as well as established players, but disgruntled players that just dip in and out without becoming a regular player could quite easily put off other new players that sign up.

At WhichBingo we do enable people to let off steam occasionally via our review pages, but the volume of players and the prizes distributed would indicate that more people are happy than unhappy at Jackpotjoy.

Now there is the chance for 20 players to win a trip to Benidorm with Jackpotjoy and there is a good chance it will be those members that play each and every day that will scoop some of those seats just by the sheer volume of their gameplay and their loyalty. This is why they play there and there is no reason why other players should regard such offers as a suspicious fix.

We’d all like to be a big winner, but in the meantime well done to Jackpotjoy on this wonderful milestone and to all the lucky winners.

WhichBingoAnita

I feel a bit like a stuck record at the moment, but I’m being well impressed by William Hill Bingo right now. The offers that keep being released are certainly successful in encouraging people to return and are working big time on me.

I’m not one to keep going back to the same bingo site over and over again, but it’s hard to resist when there is the chance to win £475 a week for a full year, like in the live free offer that’s just finished or the current chance to win a share of £5,000 every day.

I think I’ve said before that I love a good escalator jackpot (where the ball count increases over a short period of time) and especially if it has to go in the day.

Up to now Rehab Bingo have had the best offer, holding such a game every Thursday, but right now William Hill Bingo have got in on the act and have one every day until 4th February.

The ball count rises from 38 every hour from 5pm and the game winner receives £2,500, but every other player in the winning game receives a share of the other £2,500 depending on how many tickets they held in the game.

I played the other night and it got to just after 10pm and the jackpot still hadn’t fallen, so I purchased max tickets for a couple of games and was lucky enough to be in the winning game. The following day I logged in and there was £29 in my account (and not as bingo bonus either) as my share of the pot. That was a great feeling, so multiply that by the almost 300 people that were in the room and that’s a lot of happy bingo players.

I went to try my luck again last night just before 9.30pm and the pot had already gone, so it doesn’t always go to a high ball count, but that’s the unpredictability of the bingo game. I’ll be back to try again.

WhichBingoAnita

It’s really funny how things seem to happen in a pattern. Yesterday we published an article about what makes Nutty Bingo stand out from the crowd and last night when I do my shopping I am presented with yest another way that they are going the extra mile.

Lot’s of firms are now using the back of supermarket receipts to advertise themselves. It may be local restaurants or local tradesmen. But the beauty of this type of advertising is that is usually features some kind of special offer and the amount of people it reaches nationwide.

The Nutty Bingo ad on the back of my Morrison’s Supermarket receipt stood out and was impossible to ignore. Of course, I recognised the colourscheme straight away from the WhichBingo directory and from having played at the site, but anyone not familiar with Nutty Bingo would be unlikely to forget that they had seen the ad thanks to the distinctive purple based colour scheme and the bingo ball shaped logo with different sized eyes!

The ad featured a £5 free offer for new members using bonus code SHOP when they register. Now I hold no responsibility if this code doesn’t work as I haven’t verified it through official channels. However, if you haven’t tried Nutty Bingo yet, it’s worth giving it a go for a possible free £5 no deposit bingo bonus to explore this new bingo site.

Let me know if it works and what you think of Nutty Bingo and its efforts to become a household name.

WhichBingoAnita

Jackpotjoy are turning my day upside down today, but one thing’s for certain – their aim was to cheer people up on a day that research has said is one of the most depressing in the calendar and in my case that has certainly worked and I haven’t even won anything – yet!

Barbara Windsor is in the Jackpotjoy office in her role as their Queen of Bingo and she has thousands of pounds to give away. She is making calls to online bingo players and there is lots going on on the Jackpotjoy Facebook page too involving giving money away and everyone is getting really into it.

Jackpotjoy Bingo are putting some of the calls on Facebook. The first one found a very happy lady who was told she had won £100. Barbara asked where she was – turned out to be Tenerife!! You would have thought that would have been a very short call, paying to call a mobile abroad, but no – the conversation lasted two and a half minutes. The call will nearly have cost the same again as the prize money.

This afternoon I got a call!! Yes, I got all giddy. The ‘phone rang. I didn’t know the number. I took a deep breath, answered with a loud ‘Oi, Oi, Oi’ and was met by silence. I waited a few seconds then a male voice said ‘This is Neil, from Policy Expert – can I talk to you about the quote you obtained recently?’

I fell about. I couldn’t speak – not to mention the guys in the office having a good laugh at my expense. That poor man. Sorry Neil, we weren’t laughing at you – Jackpotjoy has got a lot to answer for today.

There are going to be a lot of happy people around the country (and in Tenerife) today, with each call or Facebook prize being worth lots of lovely cash and I wonder how many will have done what I did? Let me know if you got yourself into a scrape by taking part in this promo – or if you really got a call.

WhichBingoAnita

It started on 26th December and at that point 20th January 2012 seemed a long way off, but on 21st January William Hill Bingo will reveal the winner of their Live For Free in 2012 prize draw.

This drew me in and I have tried to spend some time at William Hill Bingo this month as every week for a year they will prersent the lucky winner with a £475 cash payment. That will do nicely thank you! There were daily prizes on offer too and just for info, the last day’s prize is the one many people have been waiting for and is the ubiquitous and ‘no contest is complete without it’ iPad2.

However, I have just checked and I am not sure that my 47 prize draw entries will really cut the mustard, do you? Some of you will have been playing at William Hill Bingo day and night all month and have hundreds of entries, if not thousands. Let me know how many you have and what I am up against! They do say however it only takes one to win.

That amount of cash would certainly change my life and I am sure it is the same for many bingo players out there, so William Hill have done it again and hit the nail on the head as to what appeals to the wider market. It’s even better that there was no other action required than actually playing at the site.

William Hill Bingo won the WhichBingo promotion of the year for 2011 with its Car a Day offer, but this ‘Live Free’ offer could be an early entry to the shortlist for 2012 don’t you think?

If this is how they are starting the year I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year brings. Wish me luck for draw day!

WhichBingoAnita

So, finally there is an online bingo site that taps into the success of Big Brother. I can’t understand why a Big Brother Bingo has only just launched given that the programme was a the height of its success around the mid noughties. However, aside from the fact that the biggest days of Big Brother itself are behind them, that doesn’t mean that the online bingo site that bears its name is past its sell by date.

On the contrary. All new Big Brother Bingo takes the theme of the show, being the house, tasks, diary room, evictions, fame and fortune and just incorporates them into a traditional bingo site that is fun and easy to play.

It has avoided tapping directly into the show with actual Big Brother logos or pictures or actual characters that the show has created. Big Brother Bingo stands alone and is all the better for it. Joy of Bingo have done a sterling job and taken the basic format of the programme and translated it successfully into a bingo format.

This new bingo site is going for maximum publicity on launch and has released a TV advert. By direct contrast to the site itself, the scene depicted is a mock up of a Big Brother winner coming out of the house to fireworks and streamers. Asked what she is most looking forward to now she is out of the house the answer is, of course, playing Big Brother Bingo.

You would think that with 12 series behind them, plus various celebrity versions, Big Brother Bingo would have been able to secure the services of at lease one past winner that would appreciate another 5 minutes of fame to play the ‘winner’ in the advert.

Craig Phillips has done ok, as has Brian Dowling – now actually hosting the show on Channel 5. However, in recent years the winners have not been that memorable and 2008 and 2009 winners Rachel Rice and Sophie Reade would probably have been glad of the work.

Maybe Big Brother Bingo never thought to ask, as I can’t see it having been too expensive to have them. Or it could be that they are determined to maintain that certain distance from the actual show itself, so the bingo site can stand on its own merits even if (and when) the TV show comes to an end. That’s certainly not a bad idea.

WhichBingoAnita

Have you seen that Blockbusters is coming back to television this year? Although it was announced a while ago that this was a possibility it has only just been confirmed.

40 episodes if an all new Blockbusters have been commissioned by Talkback Thames and the show will be broadcast on Challenge TV. Challenge TV have been testing the water by running the old shows, but one fundamental change that has been made is that this will be a Blockbusters that will feature adult players and not schoolkids.

The childish innocence was part of the charm of the original show, but most are so streetwise these days that would probably be lost anyway. Many of the adults that will be on the show will probably remember it from first time round and some may have also featured on it – that would make a great story for the channel.

Within the online bingo world there is only one site that saw the writing on the wall for this brand a couple of years ago when they introduced a unique Blockbusters based bingo game. That site was Mecca Bingo and as you would not expect the format of the new show to change too much from the original they should be on to a winner.

The Mecca Bingo Blockbusters game is fast and furious as of course there are only 26 letters in the alphabet and players only need to get four or five to win a line. No chance to get bored in the Blockbusters room.

It is a shame that the confirmation of the all new Blockbusters had to come so close to the death of the iconic host of the original Blockbusters, Bob Holness, but hopefully the new show will be a fitting tribute to what he created all those years ago.

WhichBingoAnita

Even the best of us sometimes get frustrated when it would appear that a few lucky players are scooping all the prizes at our favourite sites, or even at new bingo sites that we have decided to join to see it we can find something a bit different to enjoy and those ‘same winners’ seem to be everywhere.

We ask ourselves how, with hundreds or sometimes thousands of players in the room, can the same people win more than one game in quick succession. We ask ourselves how, if there are only 25 people in the room can it not be our turn to win occasionally.

While many of us content ourselves with a few choice words in the direction of the screen or some rude gestures, others take to online forums or the WhichBingo reviews pages to scream about sites being fixed or a con or having planted players. Yet very few are prepared to accept that sheer good luck is what bingo in all its forms is all about.

Over Christmas the Virtue Fusion sites had the £500k giveaway every night. I logged in to have a look via Paddy Power Bingo one night an although there were 1400 people playing, I thought what the heck, someone has to win and invested £5 in tickets. In that game the same person won the two lines prize and the full house meaning they scooped around £1200 in prize money. How many people genuinely wished them well compared to those that said no way is that possible? But who knows how many games they had played or how much they had spent for their run of good fortune?

As a bingo veteran I am sure that online bingo is no more fixed than land based bingo can be. Card allocation is random as is the number generator for each game.

In an effort to try and explain once and for all why online bingo is totally safe and above board we have been doind some investigating at WhichBingo and the results will be shown in an Editorial on the site in the next few days.

At this point we will not be including any further comments in reviews or posts from readers that refer to the perceived issue of same winners at particular bingo sites. If our reviewers are all taken at face value most of us are wasting our time playing at nearly every bingo site out there as there is a list of same winners and we are not on it so don’t stand a chance, so why bother.

If that was the case I would have had to give up playing years ago as I would be bankrupt and most certainly in the divorce courts if I did not manage to win occasionally against this band of players that are out to deprive me of what is rightfully mine!

I’ve had fun doing the digging and I hope you will enjoy the findings and I look forward to seeing what you all have to say.

WhichBingoAnita