Review: Sky Bingo
At Lemons & Sevens we’re here to help you make the best decisions about where to gamble your money, whether you’re playing blackjack, scratchcards, or bingo! Today we’re looking at the bingo offering at Sky Bingo (from the same people behind Sky Poker), and whether it’s a worthwhile bingo site for you to use.
What is Sky Bingo?
Sky Bingo is one of the six core brands of the Sky Betting & Gaming offering - which also includes Sky Poker and Sky Casino (in fact, we’ve reviewed Sky Poker and Sky Blackjack before). Although it’s by no means the biggest online bingo site in the UK, we think Sky Bingo deserves a little more recognition, as it’s easy to play and offers competitive payouts. (Though the sign-up offers aren’t anything special.)
Sky Bingo Sign-Up Offers & Bingo Bonus
The Sky Bingo sign-up offer at the moment (December 2020) is a £40 bonus to spend on bingo once you deposit and wager £10. In addition to the £40 bonus, new players receive an extra £20 to use on up to 100 spins at the Sky Vegas online slots. So the Sky Bingo Sign Up offer is worth £60; at least on paper.
That said, the Sky Bingo terms & conditions reveal that there is a 2x wagering requirement on the bingo bonus, and a whopping 20x wagering requirement on the slots bonus. This means that you’ll have to spend a minimum of £80 on bingo and £400 on slots before you are able to withdraw any winnings you make on the bonus credit.
Secondly, while the offer is marketed as 100 free spins at Sky Vegas slots, it’s actually just a £20 credit which you can only spend on the Rainbow Riches slot machine. So in reality, new players can play 10x £1 spins, or 200x 10p spins, or any combination of amounts that add up to £20.
It’s also worth noting that if you’ve previously signed up to any of the other six Sky betting brands, such as Sky Poker or Sky Casino, you won’t count as a new player - even if you’ve never played bingo before - so you won’t qualify for the sign-up offer.
How to Play Sky Bingo
As you’d expect from one of the biggest betting brands in the world, Sky Bingo’s software is very user friendly. To begin playing bingo at Sky Bingo, you don’t even have to download anything - it’s just a matter of signing into the Sky Bingo website, depositing funds, and choosing a game.
Even depositing funds is easy, as once you’ve used a debit card (no credit cards accepted), Sky Bingo gives you the option to save your card details for next time. However, it does set the deposit amount at £30 automatically, so be careful you don’t deposit too much if you’re just looking for some fast and fun £10 play.
Sky Bingo Customer Service
Although Sky Bingo is really easy to use, they also have customer services representatives on hand, who they call “Chat Hosts” to keep you company and provide any information or assistance that you need. They even provide little in-chat games for the players, which although cheesy, suck you into their sense of bingo community (and keep you gambling for longer too).
That said, half of their role at Sky Bingo seems to be telling people off for getting angry at the game.
Sky Bingo Variations
Once you’re logged into Sky Bingo, just jump into the bingo lobby to enjoy your choice of 21 different bingo variations. In the lobby you have the opportunity to filter the games based on whether you want to play classic 90 ball bingo, or 75 ball or 80 ball bingo variations.
There are also variations of bingo available on Sky Bingo which are played with a nonstandard number of balls, such as “Housey”, which is played with a deck of cards rather than balls, and as such, this is technically a 52 “ball” bingo variant.
The most expensive bingo variant available on Sky Bingo is Cash Cubes, which can cost as much as £2 per ticket and is a 36 ball bingo variant.
Once you have decided the type of bingo you want to play, you can choose between various “themes” of bingo - which are all incredibly similar but have slightly different buy-ins, bonus games, sounds or skins to them.
Sky Bingo Bonus Games
At Sky Bingo, bingo is never just bingo. Most of the bingo variants have a Jackpot prize available or a bonus game to play on the side. For example, one of the most popular variations of bingo available on the Sky Bingo site is Deal or No Deal Bingo, which has a corresponding “Jackpot Ticket Prize”.
Sky Bingo describes the DOND Box Jackpot ticket prize as the following:
“Win a DOND Box Jackpot ticket prize by claiming the Full House on any number that is not already marked on the DOND Box Jackpot ticket. If your number does not complete a line, you will receive the Any Number prize. If your number completes a line, 2 lines, or a full house on the DOND box jackpot ticket, you will receive the corresponding prize. The DOND Box Jackpot ticket is the same for all players and will be replaced when the full house is won.”
Different bingo games have different jackpots and bonus features which are triggered in different ways and can win different amounts. This is Sky Bingo’s way of keeping the game interesting, as you can trigger different bonus games as you switch between the bingo variants.
Sky Session Bingo
Like many online bingo providers, Sky Bingo offers the option to play “Session Bingo” at periodic intervals throughout the day. Session Bingo costs the same for all players to participate, meaning that all players have the same chance of winning in any one session.
When players buy a Session Bingo ticket at Sky Bingo, they receive at least 14 games to be played within a single hour. Each player receives between 6 and 15 tickets, depending on the games to be played and the price of the session chosen. However, whichever games and session you play, all other players will receive the exact same number of tickets and games.
Session bingo at Sky Bingo is only available at four set times per day, which are:
Morning - 09:00-09:56
Afternoon - 13:00-13:56
Evening - 19:00-19:56
Twilight - 23:00-23:56
These sessions cost various amounts and have prize pools to match, with larger buy-ins equalling larger prize pools (though the difference in prize pool is not always equivalent to the buy-in size, and is dependent on the number of players in a session).
The morning session costs £3 and has a minimum prize pool of £150
The afternoon session costs £5 and has a minimum prize pool of £225
The evening session costs £7 and has a minimum prize pool of £420
The twilight session costs £5 and has a minimum prize pool of £225
How much does it cost to play Sky Bingo?
Sky Bingo charges between £0.01 and £2:00 per ticket, depending on the game. As you might expect, the larger the ticket price, the larger the potential win. Some of the more expensive games have more valuable bonus games too, such as Deal or No Deal and its Jackpot Box Ticket game we mentioned before.
As on all bingo sites, you can buy multiple tickets per game. The number of tickets you can buy per game on Sky Bingo depends on the game. For example, on Age of the Gods, players can buy a maximum of 72 tickets for £3.60 (5p each), and at Sky Pennies players can buy a maximum of 60 tickets at 2p each for £1.20.
Some games, such as Sky Bingo Cash Cubes, have multi-price bingo, where you can buy multiple tickets at different prices per ticket. The higher the price of the ticket, the larger the prize pot that ticket is able to win a share of.
Sky Bingo Payouts
The amount you can win at Sky Bingo can vary wildly, as the prizes are based on a “prize pool” system which depends on how many people have purchased tickets. There is also always the chance that you will have to split your winnings with one or more players if multiple players win a line, two lines, or a full house at the same time.
The amount that the Sky Bingo bonus games pay out can also vary from game to game, as the jackpots increase with time until someone wins them and they reset.
How long does it take Sky Bingo to pay out?
Sky Bingo pays out its winnings almost immediately - within ten minutes - after you request it into your account. While we were playing Sky Bingo, we won £230, which was in our bank account as soon as we requested the transfer.
Is Sky Bingo Worth It?
Overall, we were really happy with Sky Bingo, and not just because we won a lot of money on it. We really put the platform through its paces technologically, and we didn’t encounter any bugs or frustrations. Sky Bingo makes it really easy for you to play, and we enjoyed the friendly chat functions of the games too.
If you’d like to learn more about using Sky Bingo, check out this video where we play (and win) Sky Bingo’s range of bingo variants.
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