Australian Bingo

Housie is the name of the game for Bingo in Australia. Housie is the Australian adaptation for the much popular 90 ball bingo and is quite different form American style 75 ball bingo.

Over the time, Bingo has evolved into varous forms and variations fromt the 75 ball bingo to 90 ball bingo and the 80 ball bingo. Not only that Bingo is played with different quantity of balls, but is also known by different names in different countries like Loteria in Mexico, Housie in Australia, Bingo in US and Tambola & Lotto in India.

In Australian versions, players buy tickets in the form of books. For those who intend to play just for a session or two usually buy a strip of six bingo tickets, popularly known as Flyers. American bingo card has 5X5 matrix, while the Australian bingo tickets have 27 spaces arranged in three rows and nine columns. Each row bears 5 numbers and four blank spaces, which is much unlike American bingo card that includes 24 numbers except one free space in the middle. Just like 90 ball bingo, housie is played with 90 numbers distributed among three columns of every ticket, which carries 15 numbers in total. The first column contains the numbers from 1 to 9, the second column includes the numbers from 10 to 19 and so forth up to the ninth column which consists of numbers from 80 to 90. It is exactly the same as Tambola played with 90 numbers or cues

Australian bingo can be won in a variety of ways depending on the various winning patterns decided by the organisors. However, some of the traditional winning patterns include First, Second and Thrid line followed by a full house or Housie – the biggest prize winning combination in Australian bingo.