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DiscussTek t1_je15dxg wrote

A very big issue with this thing, is that bingo isn't exactly a single-player "game". Someone will win, the question is who will win first. Or rather, who gets the luckiest the fastest.

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rwkgaming t1_je153lw wrote

So the reason you are getting a different answer online is because you are likely just doing your odds of winning or rather just your win/los ratio which is far different from the actual probability.

The actual probability is based on the amount of balls in the game and your card. There is a specific calculation for getting the odds for when you then remove odds from the pool which is what you get online.

You could also simplify it and base it on which card you pick at which point it would be 1/x where x is the number of cards since there always has to be one person to win

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Twin_Spoons t1_je19lu7 wrote

You'd probably need to provide some more information on the exact rules you play by. For example, if the rules are "Draw balls until someone wins" then each person has a roughly equal chance to win. If you are playing with N total people, that is 1/N. Play alone, and you're certain to win. Play with one other opponent and you will win 1/2 the time. And so on.

But your 20% win rate suggests that you're either playing with small crowds or by some other rules.

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MtPollux t1_je15jsp wrote

Based on your previous stats, you've won just over 20% of your games (1 in 5). I don't know the mathematical probability of winning at bingo, but based on my experience 20% is very high. You've been lucky.

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Fredissimo666 t1_je1arck wrote

It depends on the two following factors :

- how many cards you play with vs the total number of cards

- Does only the first person to finish wins or the first few players?

- What do you count as "a game" (one go starting with fresh cards, or a whole evening with several runs)

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gordonjames62 t1_je1hwsn wrote

Hi!

We don't actually have any way of knowing.

It feels like you are making one of the many variations of the gamblers fallacy.

Here is what we would need to know to predict odds.

  • Number of bingo cards you hold.
  • Total number of bingo cards distributed.

Any special cases for winning aside from simply first to get 5 in a row (that might skew the odd to encourage people to buy/play more cards).

If you held 10 out of 1000 cards in play your likelihood of getting any win condition first would be 10/1000 or 1%.

If you continued to play these odds 100 times, you would likely win once.

Past actions do not change the odds of future games.

Since "the house" usually gets a part of the take, this means your likelihood of losing is bigger than your chance of winning.

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LurkerMD t1_je1hqv6 wrote

I think all these answers are off base. People are trying to calculate the chance of getting 5 in a row, which depends on the numbers,etc…

But every bingo game ends once someone gets Bingo. Assuming everyone has an equal chance of winning, the. Your chance of winning depends only on the number of players.

If you were playing bingo with one person, your probability of winning is 50% (ignoring the possibility of ties)

If you’re playing bingo with 100 people your chance of winning is 1%.

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explainlikeimfive-ModTeam t1_je1w7ag wrote

Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):

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