I’m entering my second year as a Bingo caller, and almost nothing else has taught me as much about the elderly.

It’s almost a cliche to walk into an assisted care facility and see the residents playing Bingo. Bingo is played all over the country, American Legion and church basements, in nursing homes and assisted care.

The first thing I learned about Bingo and the elderly is that it is good for them.

It exercises the brain, breaks up the monotony, is inherently social,  engages the brain in better hand-eye co-ordination, is competitive and thus stimulating, and also has an enduring tradition of reward: money in some cases, prizes in others.

The residents yell at the caller – me – and chide me when their cards are full. They watch out for one another, pointing it out when they miss a call to their favor, urging one another to hang one, lucky is coming just around the corner.

One of my Bingo regulars is Brother Peter, a monk for more than 50 years who lived in a nearby monastery. He is one of the most regular game players and never accepts a prize, always turning it over to someone else.

He is serious about the game, rarely chats with the other players and doesn’t hang around to socialize and trade prizes.

I asked him once why he played, and he said he learned in his monastery – he was alone for much of the day –  that it was very important to socialize several times a day – at meals especially – or you can lose the knack of talking to other people.

I think for him Bingo is a kind of social exercise, keeping his hand in knowing how to talk to people.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but an assisted care facility does have much in common with a monastery, at least in some ways.

Bingo is both an individual game and a social one. Some of the residents deliberately sit at tables by themselves, they don’t want to talk. Some pair up and help each other, when somebody wins, everyone else in the room applauds.

I know from my gambling days that competitions add some excitement, adrenaline flows a bit. Maria and I were both surprised by the amount of cheating that sometimes goes on in cames.

Maria and I are both good Bingo callers now, we shout out the numbers clearly, we kid one another and the residents, sometimes we even sing the number to  change the place. The aides tell me we have tripled attendance. It might just be the prizes.

One resident was winning six or seven times in a game, the odds were long against that week after week, we concluded he was cheating, but it took us weeks to figure out how: he was remembering the numbers we called out and pretending that he had them on his board.

Since then, there have been several instances of cheating. We caught all of them, and all of them still play.

We dealt with this first round of cheating by limiting his wins to two. After that, we said, the cheater would have;’ had to stop playing. He stopped cheating and wins every now and then. One woman gives me the evil eye if I don’t call her numbers and another joke that I will have to walk home if he loses.

They are joking (he was) but they really do want to win. Victories in their lives are few and far between, they gloat and beam when they get one.

The prizes come in a prize cart stuffed with baubles and cards and costume jewelry from the dollar store. If I have any money, I’ll stop at the bead store and the book store and bring some classier prizes. The residents will always ask for stuffed animals or gaudy costume jewelry.

Elderly people are notorious gamblers. When I worked on a documentary about gambling in Atlantic City with Bill Moyers, we both were astonished to see how many older women poured into the casinos every week with their social security checks in their bags. They waited in long lines to cash them in for poker chips.

There is one other thing about Bingo that is appealing to the elderly. You can play it just as easily in a wheelchair or with a walker by your side. Bingo may be the world’s most inclusive sport, anybody who can get there can scan his or her card and win.