When it comes to thinking about celebrities, bingo players probably don’t get very far into the spotlight. But famous bingo players do remain, and many of them end up becoming celebrities in their own right.
bombard Hilton, an English man who is survived by his wife and three children, was one of the first to star as a bingo player. He won worldwide recognition for his game, although he wasn’t always welcome to the capital’s bingo halls. He began playing bingo in the 1970’s with a different version of the game than today, and was initially only known as “Theatre lucky one”. He then began playing 90 ball bingo in the early 80’s.
Paul Daniels, another English man, won awards for his contribution to the gaming industry. Daniels developed the phenomenon of the video poker machine and is credited by IBM as being the inventor of the computer program that helped write the software behind pokers.
John Galiano, a Canadian farmer, built and developed a game called piggy bank bingo. Essentially, the game is still the same as traditional bingo, but instead of completing a pre-defined pattern, the players simply have to gamble on whether the next number is lower than or higher than a particular number.
Straight away, it’s clear that bingo needs a healthy degree of luck to keep the players at the table. Even if they do win, the payout is smaller than if the game were played independently. (Another popular version is 75 ball, in which players are given five chances to win before the game begins.) Daniels is careful to stress this point, making it clear that even if a player plays using the same number for every spin, the odds of winning are the same.
But it’s a bet that many players can’t pass up. Even if they’re only playing for fun, it’s possible that they’re attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Usually, the best kind of attention is reserved for people who get caught cheating. Usually, the attention is well-earned when the cheater is punished severely enough – through fine ranging from community service to lengthy stint in prison.
But there are also cases of famous players who got into trouble for much less.
In the United Kingdom, there’s the ongoing saga of Gary faces Articles of Discipline. He’s a football fan who frequently parties with celebrities – including Elle Macpherson and david Beckham – but one Saturday morning he and some friends went to have some fun at a bingo hall and discovered they’d over paid for a space.
They’d managed to cheat the hall into thinking they’d scored a perfect 100% and the hall was so delighted they couldn’t contain its excitement. pictures of the heads of Beckham and Macpherson appeared on the walls.
Luckily, there were only a couple of tables running when the media caught on to the story and started referring to it as Gary faces Articles of Discipline. Of course, the players deny it, but the club’s motto is “a game worth more than a life.”