THUNDER BAY – Check under the G, for gone.
That’s been the story of the season for HAGI TV Bingo, where Monday morning lineups have been commonplace as anxious players await the drop-off of game sheets at convenience stores around Thunder Bay – and even into surrounding communities.
Within hours, and sometimes sooner, the sold out signs start appearing, an unprecedented surge in pandemic fuelled interest making Saturday night television bingo one of the hottest hobbies in town, one that pays out between $3,000 and $5,000 a week to those lucky enough to have scavenged out the correct card.
It’s been crazy, said long-time host Gary Cooper.
“COVID has driven our numbers out of the world. We’re selling out. Six-thousand sheets of bingo are being sold out almost every Saturday, five-thousand sheets when there’s a $3,000 bingo,” Cooper said.
It all comes to close on Saturday night, at least until next fall, when the long-running organization’s licence to air returns.
“It’s not the end, it’s the season finale. We’ll be back in September and we are looking at changing things. We’re going to have more sheets for sale coming in September. We’re going to have more $5,000 prizes,” Cooper said.
More prize money and more tickets means more money collected for the cause, which helps send the physically challenged to HAGI Wildnerness Discovery Camp each summer, offering them an outdoor experience that can be difficult at other locations in Ontario because of accessibility issues.
Cooper said they would have liked to have been able to offer more tickets this season, but a combination of obstacles stood in their way, not the least being the company that supplied their cards being beyond capacity and regulations not allowing them to supplement their stock from another printer.
The condition of the licence also called for them to wind down their season this weekend.
Moving forward, Cooper said the organization is excited, but cautious.
They’re not sure if the increased interest in HAGI TV Bingo will continue into the post-pandemic world, or if things will go back to pre-COVID times.
“We would love to go beyond what we’re doing this Saturday and it ending for the season, but we did not anticipate COVID shutting us down. That’s what happened and we didn’t extend the ending of our licence,” Cooper said.
“Over the summer we’re going to sit down and we’re going to talk about things. We’ve already decided on a few things we want to do, like increasing more sheets for sale and more prize money. We’ll just see how it goes.”
