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However, it has recently become clear that the Dragonfish promotion page is somewhat out of date.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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I’ve been opening the doors on the William Hill Bingo Christmas Advent calendar and have so far received some 1TG winnings, bonus back on slots play and played risk free on Clover Rollover and Big Top Tombola – anything that offers the chance of extra play time is a winner in my book.

However, what I was really trying for was the guaranteed, must go £1,000 daily jackpot in the £50k Snowballing Jackpots offer. This sees £1,000 guaranteed given away every day in one lump sum when bingo is called on a rising number of calls throughout the day.

I came into the Community Room late in the day and bought my tickets. I won the full house in forty something numbers and got really excited as I never win that quickly and was sure I would be in the money! It was not be be – the snowball had been won in the Main Room on the game before mine. I had forgotten that the offer was available in both rooms.

It could have been worse, at least the prize pot was good and that helped to ease the pain of missing the big one a little and let me play longer and go back again for another go the following night. Still no joy though, but I have until Christmas Eve to fulfil my dream of a big win.

As part of the same offer there is a daily progressive jackpot that started at £1,000 on 30th November and is rising every day by £1,000 along with the ball count it will be won on – a potential £25,000 jackpot if it reaches Christmas Eve without being won!

It has to be said though that William Hill Bingo has done it again – these are certainly prizes that lots of online bingo players would love to win and are the perfect excuse to keep going back – I love it!

However, X Bingo has successfully managed to catch me on the hop yet again.

I love its Mega Wheel offer, the daily free game at offers us the chance of between 10p and hundreds of pounds in bingo bonus funds as it has its own progressive jackpot.

There are three rounds to get through for a chance at the progressive, which I might add is currently over £600, but until today the best I had managed was round 2 and a £1 bonus.

Well, today my arrows lined up a second time and I got through to the third and final round. In this one there is a one in four chance of scooping the progressive jackpot! You can win £3.50, £5, £10 or the huge progressive pot.

The wheel was spinning and I thought ‘This is it, my first ever progressive win!’. As it turns out I am still waiting. It landed on £10 and refused to move that last few millimetres to the word ‘Jackpot’ that would have seen me more than £600 better off.

Never mind, I will keep trying and well done X Bingo for such an inventive daily game – made all the better for being free.

Watch out for our X Bingo video coming soon, or pop over to X Bingo to have a look for yourself.

I do like a good no deposit bingo bonus and Bingo Funland provides a free £10 to play with. However, a word to the wise. This is a Bingo Entertainment site, so any winnings from the bonus cannot be withdrawn until a deposit is made and then would be subject to a huge 15x wagering requirement. The good news is that by making a first deposit on sign up there are no wagering requirements and any winnings from cash or bonus can be withdrawn at £30 and over.

I take this opportunity to issue this timely reminder as I recently took some bonus cash offered by Ritzy Bingo on the same platform, forgetting that when that site launched at the beginning of the year I hadn’t cottoned on to the fact of the wagering on winnings from bonus.

I was lucky enough to have some small bingo wins and a £40 win on a slot spin, but of course I could not draw out as it turned out I hadn’t deposited. I put that right and fortunately managed to keep having a few small wins to keep me going and I finally made the 15x wagering, but it was tough going. It’s a good job I was enjoying playing the software. I’m determined not to fall into that trap again and I don’t want you to either.

I think this is a great deal and well worth a small initial investment. As a new site the rooms are not overflowing with players and even the networked games are not madly oversubscribed. Having said that it is worth looking out for the guaranteed games that feature in some of the rooms for the chance of some better prize pots.

Bingo Funland offers something a bit different for those that are looking for a change from the standard Dragonfish and Virtue Fusion offerings and that is certainly to be welcomed.

The purple and green colour scheme won’t be to everybody’s  taste, but again people can only take so much candy floss pink and turquoise and white that so many new bingo sites have been adopting.

The big thing though is that people join and populate the bingo rooms to make the prizes worth winning and at least a decent bingo bonus offer makes this more likely to happen.

Fabulous Bingo is new, but it opened quite quietly before now going for the full on marketing push to get as many new players to the site as possible. This new site had a wonderful feature during its first week of operation that saw a particular game every hour being worth either £10, £20 or £100 more to the full house winner. The amount was determined by a random spin of a bonus wheel.

This feature was very popular as it offered the bonus as cash and not just bingo bonus and I am starting a campaign to get it brought back. When a new bingo site is launched it needs something to mark it out from the rest and this was perfect. People were excited and would stick around in the hope of winning a bigger prize. This meant that the prize pots were of a general better standard too.

These Gamesys bingo sites are great fun, but there is a danger that Fabulous could end up just another small site with small pots that Heart Bingo and CAESARS Bingo are trying to build from.

Fabulous Bingo has a fabulous look and feel and the basis of its offer around the weekend magazine presented with The Sun newspaper and its links to all things fashion means it has a fantastic opportunity to be one of the biggest sites around. There is a 100% first deposit bonus available and a 50% bonus on second deposits, but small prize pots outside the linked games will not keep players interest for long.

Bring back the bonus wheel Fabulous Bingo and we players will be there in abundance and we’ll stick around.

Did you get to play at Fabulous Bingo during its first week? Did you win big on the bonus wheel? Do you agree it would be great to see it back? Let me know what you think.

Thanks to the Americans Halloween is fast turning into a festival in its own right to rival Christmas and Easter. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the online bingo sites. It doesn’t matter which one you visit, you will not escape some reference to Halloween, usually accompanied by some really bad puns that usually only used to appear at Easter.

It’s ‘spooktacular’ this, ‘ghoulish’ that, ‘boo-nanza’ the other. There are ‘spook-tastic’ offers, rooms full of ‘fiendish fun’, you name it and you will find it at the online bingo sites.

However, having said that what I can’t fault in a lot of cases are the actual prizes that are being given away by a lot of the bingo sites this year.

At first glance when you see things like a years supply of Haribo Spooky Ghosts or Horror Mix you might think, ‘Why bother?’. Well, this is what Costa Bingo is offering, but on closer inspection it actually turns out to be £365 worth of Asda vouchers, which could be used to buy a bag of the sweets every day. However, with Christmas approaching that is a transferable offer not to be ignored. The fact that it is free to depositing players makes it even sweeter.

City Bingo is giving away a PS3 among many other things, Jackpotjoy is giving away £13,000 and tombola have £10,000 up for grabs. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

A notable late starter in the Halloween offers this year is Foxy Bingo. The king of the bad puns has really held himself back so far and is not launching a Halloween onslaught until Thursday, 27th October. The fun at Foxy Bingo will be a Trick or Treat everyone’s a winner offer and a five day House of Horror promo.

I may not like the Americanisation of Halloween, but I do like the prizes it is extracting from the online bingo sites. The pre-buy buttons could be getting quite a bit of use this week so people don’t miss out.