Luckity.Com Review (Closed)

Update: Luckity.com Bingo closed in October of 2014. Churchill Downs announced the orderly closure of the bingo/horse racing website due to a failure to perform to financial expectations.

This bingo site is no longer in business and is no longer accepting new players. It was nice while we had it, but they just couldn’t quite generate enough interest to make it worthwhile for Churchill Downs to keep pumping money into the project.

Our Luckity.com review will not be updated further, unless Churchill Downs relaunches the brand in the future.

Finally, we have a real money bingo site right here in the United States that is 100% legal and licensed to offer its games online. It’s been a long time coming thanks to odd gaming laws in the US but finally, online bingo is here and it’s called Luckity Bingo.

Luckity.com is a US-legal bingo site authorized by the state of Oregon to host real money games for players inside the United States. As the only licensed bingo website in the US, Luckity.com offers the unique opportunity to play bingo online and win real cash prizes.

The games they have on offer work like you would expect from any game of bingo. You buy cards, wait for the calls and mark off your card accordingly. If you’re the first person to complete the designated pattern, you win money. That’s what Luckity Bingo has and this is my review. Read on for all the juicy details.

Playing at Luckity Bingo

Luckity Bingo hosts both traditional bingo games with cash prizes and “clover” bingo games that award entries to a weekly $100 drawing. New games are hosted every few minutes and you can play as many cards as you wish per game. The more bingo cards you play, the more chances you have to win.

You can play real money bingo at Luckity by signing up for an account and making a deposit to fund your account. The account signup form will ask for basic information such as your name and phone number, username and password. You can then head over to the cashier’s area to make a deposit.

Once you have a funded account, you can participate by purchasing bingo card packages. Each package gives you three different things:

• Cash game bingo cards
• Clover bingo cards
• Free tickets to the weekly $100 drawing

Each game pack ends up giving you three ways to win money. The cash bingo cards are used in games that award prizes at the end of each game. This is the quickest way to win money and most closely resembles the bingo games you may have played as a youngster.

Clover bingo games award “clovers” which can be redeemed for entries into the weekly $100 giveaway. You can earn and redeem as many entries as you wish each week. The more entries you have, the greater the likelihood of winning one of those weekly drawings.

Finally, each game pack also just gives you entries to that same drawing. I like to look at these as a bonus for playing. You don’t have to do anything special with these tickets. Just submit them to the drawing and cross your fingers for a win.

How to Deposit At Luckity Bingo

You can fund your Luckity account with any of the following methods:

How Is Luckity Bingo Legal?

That was my first thought as well. Up until now, all the bingo sites that accepted customers from the United States operated overseas contrary to US law. How on earth did someone in the US manage to get a license to host online bingo?

Luckity Bingo stays on the right side of the law by tying all its bingo games to horse races. Online horse betting is one of the few forms of internet betting that is legal in the United States. In fact, Luckity Bingo is owned and operated by Churchill Downs, which is the parent company of the Kentucky Derby and TwinSpires.com.

Whenever you buy a bingo card, Luckity places a couple of wagers on real horse races. Random horses are chosen and your winnings correspond to how those races turn out. The money that you pay for bingo cards actually goes to the wagering pool at some distance racetrack. Your winnings are a result of winning wagers at that track.

If you were cynical, you would say Luckity.com is just horse racing betting masked as bingo. If you were me, you’d say “who cares?” It’s fun, it looks and feels just like bingo and it contributes to bigger prize pools for struggling race tracks across the country. Everybody wins.

The daily racing form has a nice breakdown of the mechanics behind it all if you’re familiar with parimutuel wagering. Basically, every game you play at Luckity is somehow tied to an actual horse race. From the bingo player’s point of view, it’s just as random as a regular game of bingo. It’s just that instead of relying on random bingo balls to determine your luck, the game relies on the outcomes of random horse races.

The one catch is that not all US states allow online horse racing. Thus, only people from certain states are allowed to play for real money at Luckity.com. The federal government does not outlaw certain forms of online betting but individual states are free to make their own laws.

Luckity.com is allowed to operate in some states but not others. What you see below is a list of the states from which players are accepted followed by a list of states from which players are not accepted.

Accepted States:

Alabama	California	Colorado
Connecticut	Delaware	Florida
Idaho	Illinois	Indiana
Iowa	Kansas	Kentucky
Louisiana	Maryland	Massachusetts
Michigan	Minnesota	Montana
New Hampshire	New Mexico	North Dakota
Ohio	Oklahoma	Oregon
Pennsylvania	Rhode Island	South Dakota
Tennessee	Vermont	Virginia
Washington	West Virginia	Wisconsin
Wyoming

Restricted States:

Alaska	Arkansas	Arizona
Georgia	Hawaii	Maine
Mississippi	Missouri	Nebraska
Nevada	New jersey	New York
North Carolina	South Carolina	Texas
Utah	District of Columbia

Expert Opinion: Overall Impression

Overall, I like what Luckity Bingo is doing. They have come up with an innovative way to offer a game that very closely resembles online bingo. It’s not quite “real” bingo because it relies on horse races to determine the winners, but it sure does come close. I also like the active community and overall friendly “vibe” you get from the website.

I also like the fact that all wagers placed at Luckity Bingo are comingled with betting pools at real race tracks. The racing industry needs all the help it can get these days. Luckity Bingo is doing the industry a great favor by attracting wagers from people who aren’t necessarily interested in horse racing. Tracks generate bigger prize pools, earn more money and can offer bigger purses for race teams.

Finally, Luckity.com is owned by the reputable Churchill Downs Incorporated. Churchill Downs has been involved in horse racing for over a hundred years now and they are highly respected among players and industry insiders alike. All in all, Luckity Bingo is a safe and fun new way to play online bingo in the US.