People reading bingo articles or sites, find themselves coming across the terms bingo cards and tickets. People usually take them to mean the same thing, but technically, they refer to the different versions of the game.

Cards and tickets are the pieces of paper that the bingo game numbers are printed on. In the ninety numbers or United Kingdom version of the game, the game is played on tickets which have nine columns and three lines. There are five numbers on each of the three lines, with the other spaces left blank. A bingo is when one line, two lines or three lines are covered, depending on the game being played. This is the version of the game played in the United Kingdom and Australia. The term card refers to what is called the seventy-five number version. This is the game that developed in the United States after a toy salesman developed six thousand unique bingo cards with a five number by five number grids with one letter of the word bingo above each column.

The B column has the letters one through fifteen; the I column has the numbers sixteen through thirty; the N column has the letters thirty-one through forty-five; the G column has the numbers forty-six through sixty; and the O column has the numbers sixty-one through seventy-five. When the reader comes across the terms cards and tickets, she knows that the term cards refers to the seventy-five number version and the term tickets refers to the ninety number version.