A regular bingo occurs when there is one vertical, horizontal or diagonal line, and sometimes four-corners, depending on the house rules.  This is what is known as the American version.  The British version is played on rectangular tickets with nine columns and three lines.  There are five numbers on each line, with the remainder of the spaces left blank.  A regular online bingo UK consists of one line.  Special games consist of two lines and housie, which is three lines.  The American version of the game offers more variety in patterns due to the square nature of the grid. Many online bingo yahoo sites give their players the option of playing the British or the American version of the game.

Bingo is a game that is internationally known.  It is also the most popular game on the internet.  Bingo began as a form of national lottery in Italy in the sixteen hundreds. The popularity of the game in Italy spread to the remainder of the continent and to America.  In America, the game was restructured by a toy salesman named Edwin Lowes.  He had more than six thousand unique cards developed and restructured the game into seventy-five numbers.  Each bingo mecca card has a five by five number grid with the letters of the word bingo across the top.  The B column has numbers from one to fifteen; the I column has numbers from sixteen to thirty; the N column has numbers from thirty-one to forty-five; the G column has numbers from forty-six to sixty; and the O column has numbers sixty-one through seventy-five.