Hi. My name is Jessica Rekos! My friends call me Jess, and I’m the founder of Team Jessica and the teamjessicarekos.org website

So what is Team Jessica? Well, to be honest, it all started as a bit of a joke. I’m a big bingo fan and have been since childhood thanks to my Mum. After university, I took a job in London where I met three girlfriends (Olivia, Emily and Katie) who shared my passion. As the story goes, I could be a bit of a taskmaster at times, especially if we risked missing bingo night, so the girls poked fun at me by coining the name Team Jessica.

Although it may have started as gag, I loved it and had a lot of fun with it. I even had a dozen or so Team Jessica t-shirts printed and then handed them out to the girls.

Over time, however, Team Jessica became much more than just girls-night-out silliness. Bingo is entertainment to us, but we also take it very seriously. At first, we’d take turns scheduling bingo night, and each of us tried to top the previous planner by finding the zaniest bingo formats and locations possible. It became an adventure of sorts that was almost as important as the bingo itself.

Our approach to bingo was also an amazing experience. We learned a lot playing different types of bingo, visiting different bingo environments and meeting all those people who loved bingo as much as we did. That expanding education soon spurred heady conversations where we’d discuss and challenge each other about bingo strategies and the relative value of various formats and variants.

In the meantime, the company we worked for was expanding, and our passion for bingo was apparently infectious. Soon we had many different woman, and even men, who wanted to join us. We started hosting a special bingo night each month where we could invite anyone who wanted to come. That soon increased to once every two weeks, and before we knew, Team Jessica was several dozen strong.

In this new — and quite fabulous, I might add — situation, we often found ourselves in the role of teacher. We also found ourselves answering the same questions and explaining the same concepts, over and over again. It was so frequent that Katie even typed up a FAQ, printed dozens of copies out at work and then had them on hand to distribute to all the Team Jessica newbies.

As our hunger for bingo grew, the local options simply weren’t enough. We found ourselves driving farther and farther, and it soon became too much. It was Emily who first mentioned the idea of an online bingo hall. We tried it, loved it immediately and were soon hosting BYOL (bring your own laptop) bingo parties.

That was when we got the idea to build teamjessicarekos.org. Team Jessica was simply getting too big, and it now had members from outside the UK. The website was a wonderful way to have a centralized, virtual meeting place for the team; but like Team Jessica itself, the site soon evolved into something more.

Today, it exists as a resource for all bingo players around the world. We strive to inform and entertain. We also want to expose our members to the zaniest forms of bingo known to man. More importantly, we want to continue building our community here, and we look forward to doing that with you.