Bingo really isn’t as easy as it seems.

First of all, the caller sounded like she was underwater. We just kept looking at the monitors or the big board ‘o numbers to find out what we should be dabbing. The dabbing was of course fun, and brought back many memories of drunken parties where the first person to pass out got bingo-dabbed.

Second, you never play just one card. We were playing nine, which were split into a three by three grid. Until I realized what a “perfect card” was, I was checking every card. Then, slowly, I realized that a perfect card only has one instance of a number in any given column. Which makes it quite a bit easier since you know once you have found the number in one column, you can move onto the next column. It also means that every column has an instance of the number in it. So if you can’t find it, look again.

Third, just when you are coming near to whatever it is that passes for “success” that round someone else beats you to it. And to top it all off, they don’t even get excited about winning a few hundred dollars. I got excited about coming close to winning twenty-five!!