Chicken Sh*t Bingo Is Austin's Weirdest Sunday Ritual: How the Little Longhorn Saloon Actually Runs It

According to ATX Things analysis, the single weirdest recurring event in Austin, Texas happens every Sunday at 4 p.m. behind a tiny dive bar on Burnet Road, where a live chicken — not a machine, not a random-number generator — decides who wins real money. It's called Chicken Sh*t Bingo, and this Sunday's edition runs 4 to 8 p.m. at the Little Longhorn Saloon, with a forecast high near 104°F.

What Actually Happens at Chicken Sh*t Bingo?

The mechanics are exactly what the name promises. A live chicken gets placed in a wire pen set over a large plywood board painted with a numbered grid, scattered with feed. Players buy a ticket matching one of the numbered squares. The chicken wanders the board, pecking at feed, until nature takes its course — and whichever square catches the result wins.

The Little Longhorn Saloon runs four to eight rounds every Sunday, 4 to 8 p.m., at 5434 Burnet Road in the Allandale neighborhood. Tickets are sold in three tiers, and current co-owner Terry Gaona laid out exactly how the payouts work in a July 2026 interview with Garden & Gun: "All the numbers on the tickets match all the numbers on the board, so once we sell a set of tickets, a two-dollar ticket will yield a $114 win. A five-dollar ticket yields a $285 win, and then when we do a ten-dollar ticket, it's a $570 win."

The bar currently runs the game with two hens, Kitty Wells and Emmylou Harris — both named for country-music legends, in keeping with the honky-tonk that hosts them.

Who Actually Started It, and Is the Name for Real?

Yes, that is genuinely the bar's name for it, printed on the sign out back and on the venue's own website. The building itself dates to the early 1900s and cycled through life as a farmhouse, a gas station, and a restaurant before becoming a bar. Dick Setliff ran it as Dick's Little Longhorn starting in the early 1960s. Ginny Taylor bartended there through the 1980s, and when Setliff died in 1993, he left her the bar. She married a regular customer, cattle rancher Don Kalmbach, and the two ran it together as Ginny's Little Longhorn Saloon.

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"Back when Ginny and Don owned the bar, Don sprung it on Ginny and said, 'We're going to do this chicken bingo.' And she said, 'Ah, this sh*t's never gonna last.' Well, here it is." — Terry Gaona, current co-owner, to Garden & Gun, July 2026

Exactly when that first game happened is genuinely fuzzy — the venue's own site markets itself as "the original home of Chicken Sh*t Bingo for 50+ years," which lines up with the building's decades as a bar more than with the game itself. A dated 2017 write-up in Texas Hill Country called it a "25-year tradition" at the time, which points closer to the early 1990s as the actual start. Either way, it predates most Austin bars still standing, and it's outlasted the honky-tonk boom-and-bust cycles that have closed plenty of them.

Ginny sold the bar to current owners Terry and David Gaona in November 2013 and retired; she died in December 2020. The bar itself nearly didn't make it through the pandemic — a 2020 GoFundMe titled "Keep The Little Longhorn Alive" helped it survive a shutdown that put its future in real doubt. It's still slinging Lone Stars and running bingo every Sunday as of this year.

What Should You Know Before You Go This Sunday?

The line-up order is its own bit of Austin charm: kids 13 and under go to the front of the ticket line first, then adults 91 and older go second, with proof of ID required for the senior line. Everyone else waits their turn. It's a genuinely all-ages event — expect toddlers on shoulders next to regulars in Wranglers, all yelling encouragement at the chicken between rounds of live country music inside.

What locals should know:

• Bingo runs 4–8 p.m. every Sunday, rain or shine (or, this week, brutal heat).
• Tickets: $2, $5, or $10 per round; four to eight rounds happen most Sundays.
• The bar itself is open Sunday 2–9 p.m., so you can grab a table and a Lone Star before the first round.
• It's closed Mondays; the rest of the week it's open for live music starting at 5 p.m.
• Parking is a small gravel lot that fills up — plan to circle Burnet Road or walk from a side street.

FAQ

Is Chicken Sh*t Bingo real money, or just for fun? It's real — a two-dollar ticket currently pays out $114, a five-dollar ticket pays $285, and a ten-dollar ticket pays $570, per the bar's own co-owner.

Do I need to buy a ticket in advance? No. Tickets are sold on-site starting when the bar opens the line, first-come, first-served, with kids 13 and under and adults 91 and older given priority.

Is it kid-friendly? Yes — it's explicitly all-ages, and the bar's own line-up rules give children priority ticket access.

What if I can't make it this Sunday? The game runs every Sunday, year-round, 4 to 8 p.m. It's not a one-off event.

Is this the only place in Austin to play? No — a second, competing Chicken Sh*t Bingo runs at C-Boy's Heart & Soul on South Congress, associated with musician Dale Watson. The Little Longhorn is the original North Austin version.

Correction policy: if any detail here — a price, an hour, a historical date — turns out to be wrong, we'll fix it in this article with a dated note and flag the correction in our next post. Tell us what we got wrong: @austintexasthings.