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By 1929 game “beano” became popular during the American carnivals. Then the game was played with dried beans, rubber chips with numbers and hard paper cards. The winners instead of “Bingo” shouted “Beano”. Apparently, the game first appeared in Georgia but it quickly spread across America. In 1930 Edwin Lowe was the first to introduce licensed bingo cards making it easies to play. The license for using the trade mark “Bingo” cost $ 1 per year and it was a good marketing move. Therefore, the name of Lowe quickly became widely known in the gaming market. By the 1940 Bingo has spread throughout the United States and Canada. Every week thousands of Bingo games were played in churches and public places.

From Italy the game moved across the Alps to France where it became known as Le Lotto. It is still played there on Saturdays and the game is very similar to the modern American Bingo. The game is played with tokens, cards and the numbers are called out loud. The original version of the Italian game was very popular in Europe in 19th century. In the most popular variant the bingo card was divided into squares and each card had nine vertical columns and three horizontal rows. Each of the horizontal rows contained 5 numbers and 4 free spaces. The called numbers were written on wooden chips and kept in a bag. The goal of the game was to mark the numbers on one of the three horizontal rows. Free spaces on those cards were very similar to free spaces in modern bingo cards.

Most historians of gambling games agree that Bingo was first introduced in Italy. The game was first mentioned in late Renaissance sources, dating from around 1530. It is an interesting fact that Bingo was based on a game called Lotto which is the Italian for lot i.e. fate. For the first time bingo was used when one of the Italian cities because of the corruption during the elections needed an entirely new way to elect the governor. Therefore, it was decided to pull random numbers and the man who got one of the winning numbers was to become a governor. In other words, he was really elected by fate.

The game of Bingo was first called “beano” since players then used to mark their cards instead of chips or tokens, with dried red beans. They put beans on their cards which later turn into bingo tickets. It is pretty weird, but in the beginning, Bingo was called Keno. This name was very popular at the end of 19th century. Both names were used by the owners of illegal lottery Keno who used the confusion to deceive the authorities making them think that Keno is not a lottery. That has happened since then the game of Bingo has been legal and the lotteries not. In the end, the game in which people call numbers and use cards and chips became known as Bingo and the game in which people mark numbered blocks or spots on their tickets became known as Keno. However, Bingo was introduced long before the game in “Beano” became popular in the Midwest of America.