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However, it has recently become clear that the Dragonfish promotion page is somewhat out of date.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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We all love an award (and by the way our Site of the Year Awards results will be posted shortly) and the marketing men have recently revealed their best and worst celebrity based TV adverts of 2011.

While none of the top 10 were bingo related (no surprises there), one bingo ad has the dubious honour of reaching the top 10 of those voted as being the worst of the year!

Campaign magazine polled its readers and it turns out that the Brits Bingo TV adverts featuring Gavin Henson and Katya Virshilas were not that popular and were voted as being the second worst of the year, behind Jenson Button and his Head and Shoulders shampoo ads.

That’s some going considering how bad the Just for Men hair dye ad is that features Luis Figo and the one for Flora Cuisine featuring Vernon Kay and his mother!

Personally, I loved the Brits Bingo ads as readers of these pages will know. I think they were funny and broke the mould of the normal boring bouncing bingo ball ads, but there is no accounting for taste.

We will have to wait and see if the Brits Bingo TV ad has fared any better in our own WhichBingo end of year poll. But in the meantime, given the success both Gavin and Brits Bingo are enjoying at the moment it will be a case of any publicity is good publicity.

Now the one thing I am not a fan of are Christmas cards. All that work choosing them, writing them; the expense of posting them, only to put them in the recycling bin a few days later.

However, this year there has been a new addition to the people I am getting Christmas card from – the online bingo sites. Now the fact that things have started arriving through the post from ‘online’ bingo sites is strange enough and I can understand that they have marketing budgets to spend to ensure that players remember them and go to play. However, I have a message to some of these sites – don’t send me stuff in the post that doesn’t involve any free bonus money for me to spend!

Now the lovely people at Love Your Bingo and Ladbrokes Bingo have been good enough to send me a card and each had a small bingo bonus attached for me to use at their sites – very small I hasten to add, but still, it’s the thought that counts as they say.

On the other hand the Gamesys group of sites, Sun Bingo, Heart Bingo, CEASARS Bingo and Fabulous Bingo have all sent a card and very nice they are too – the Fabulous one in particular was a giant sized beauty – but that’s all that was in the envelope! No little surprise to tempt me to visit the sites at all. It was very disappointing from this usually most generous of operators.

If a bingo site is going to spend money on cards and postage I would expect it to be of some benefit to the customer – if not then I would prefer it to be ploughed back into the site to offer some better money games or an extra promo. It might help to keep the postman in a job, but a communication from a bingo site without an offer I can take advantage of is more likely to be regarded as junk mail than a nice thought.

That’s my ‘bah, humbug’ moan for this year, but on the other hand let me take this opportunity to wish all WhichBingo readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Have a good one everyone.

During our investigations I stumbled across this parody from Shout Bingo. This site is obviously interested in what WhichBingo readers have to say about their game play and has picked up on the strong references to ‘same winner syndrome’ and I think this short video is absolutely hilarious.

It is reproduced here with no intention to offend anyone either in connection with the period of history it is drawn from or by way of the language used – some of it is quite strong.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

(Close the ad as soon as it appears so as not to miss any of the laughs!).

No-one likes losing, but this seems to be the main time that players take to the online bingo forums to air grievences which is a shame as it tends to give an unbalanced view of the particular bingo sites they were playing at.

Maybe what happened to me over the last few days is why people get disgruntled, but it also goes to show just how random the playing of online bingo actually is when it comes to hitting that winning streak.

I am a member of lots of bingo sites, but obviously can’t play at them all the time as I don’t have a bottomless pit of money. So it is that sites often send out free bingo bonus to tempt me back to the site. I received £5 recently from Gina Bingo and was very grateful as I wouldn’t otherwise have been playing anywhere that night.

I put the entire £5 on a single coverall, jackpot must go game that I happened to log on in time for and the ball count was 59 numbers. I was amazed to win the £127 jackpot and was over the moon. I stayed a bit longer, played a few more games and had a few goes on the slots. I won a few small houses, but nothing to speak of and withdrew £90. (Incidentally withdrawing is now much simpler at these sites). I had no wagering to meet as I had deposited in the last 30 days – that’s something to watch out for!

A couple of days later I got a £5 offer from Bingo Blowout on the same software. Great I thought and logged in full of expectation. I had never deposited there,  so did so to avoid a potential 15x wagering requirement and got a 350% bonus. Wow, I had over £60 to play with. Guess what – I won one £16 house and even shared that. There were no more or less players than there had been at Gina, I still didn’t max out as it would have cost too much, but those numbers just didn’t come out in my favour – but that’s the way it goes.

I would have loved to have won more, but it just wasn’t to be – maybe next time. Oh, and I am looking forward to my free bingo bonus from Yes Bingo and Bingo Funland too – I am ever the optimist.