From July the 1st 2007, the smoking ban kicked in in England, and the results for bingo halls have been disastrous, seriously affecting player numbers and prize money. Some players have suggested holding Smoking Only bingo sessions, but this would be impossible legally. The only place where you will be able to smoke and play bingo now is on your computer at home.

Many bingo players are now turning to online bingo as an alternative. As this is played at home, the smoking ban has no effect on it at all - in fact, once the smoking ban starts to cover the whole of the UK, it is expected that online bingo will really take off! There is a wide choice of different sites, and we review many of them on this site.

In Scotland, a smoking ban was introduced in March 2006, and early reports indicate that this has been disastrous for the country’s bingo clubs. Income (and therefore prize money on some games) has dropped by up to 50%, and many clubs have already closed because of this. In the long term, it is estimated that up to half of the bingo clubs north of the border will shut down because of the smoking ban, and it seems very likely that when it is introduced in the rest of the UK the same thing will happen there.

Source: Bingomaniacs. Link

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Bingo, Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.