Just a week shy of Valentine’s Day, one lucky slot gamer landed a $3.25 million (£2.65 million) jackpot on the Las Vegas Strip.
To what the newly-minted anonymous player treated their loved one to on the romantic day that followed remains unknown, although they might just have planted a smacker on the Wheel of Fortune game housed at the Bellagio given their incredible win.
That Wheel of Fortune ‘Triple Gold Gold Spin’ game is just one of a number of slots that have a progressive jackpot; a category of gaming available at both online and high street casinos that have paid out many of the biggest cash prizes in history.
But what exactly is a progressive jackpot, how do they work and how do you set about winning one?
What Is a Progressive Jackpot?
As you may have gathered from the ‘progressive’ part of their name, these jackpots grow each and every day until they are won.
There is, generally, no upper ceiling to the jackpot, so it will continue to increase until the most fortunate of players spins the necessary combination of symbols on the reels to trigger the prize payout.
The size of the jackpot, and the rapidity of its growth, depends largely on the game’s popularity – clearly, ‘hyped’ and infamous titles like Megabucks, which has paid out well over $100 million in prize money, will have bigger jackpots.
How Do Progressive Jackpots Work?
In the news story mentioned above, every player that tried their luck on the Wheel of Fortune game would have contributed to its progressive jackpot.
A percentage of their stake will have gone into the kitty, and given that this is a slot that is played all around the world with thousands of casinos and gambling sites ‘linked’ into it, it’s no surprise to learn how quickly the prize fund can rise.
Once somebody has won the jackpot prize, it resets back to its default ‘seed’ level – normally the casino or game developer will start the ball rolling again with a few thousand (at least) in the kitty. And then the pot starts to build once more as players try their luck on the reels.
There’s no end point for most progressive jackpots, although there’s a sub-genre – ‘Must Drop’ jackpots – that have a specific deadline by which the prize must be won. These games are programmed to ‘drop’ the jackpot within the time period, so these games tend to be more feverishly played by hopeful players as that deadline approaches.
How to Win a Progressive Jackpot
If you have played slots before, either online or at a casino, you won’t be shocked to learn there’s no specific strategy or style that is guaranteed to win a jackpot.
It’s all about your luck on the day. As you may know, slot games are created with an in-built random number generator (RNG), which decides the outcome of each spin using a string of code that is wholly random and unpredictable. In short, every spin of the reels could, in theory, be a winner or a loser.
Depending on the game’s mechanics, your chances of winning a progressive jackpot are around 50 million to one – that’s quite an optimistic calculation, too. But, unlike winning the lottery, you’ll never have to share your slots jackpot with another player….only one person can walk away with the loot.
You could win the lottery by buying a single ticket – some people play the lottery for years and barely win a tenner. It’s the same with progressive jackpot slots: you could win it with a single spin, or you may never even get a sniff of the big prize. That’s the random variance of slots.
Do You Have to Stake the Maximum to Win a Progressive Jackpot?
Despite there being no set strategy for winning a progressive slot jackpot, you should read the rules of each game before you start playing.
There is a caveat that with some jackpot titles, you may need to wager a certain amount per spin to have a chance of winning the top prize. Often, that can be the maximum stake in the game.
Other jackpot slots have varying levels of jackpot – mega, major, midi and mini are some of the descriptive words used to describe each prize. For those at the lower end, it’s unlikely that you will need to abide by a minimum stake requirement.
Some jackpot slots will pay out a multiplier on your stake per spin, e.g. 1,000 times the amount you bet. But with progressives, you’ll typically win the amount that’s in the kitty when you spin a certain combination of symbols or activate the special bonus feature.
Biggest Progressive Jackpot Wins In History
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the largest ever online slot gaming win was achieved by an Englishman. Jon Heywood was playing Mega Moolah when he landed the progressive jackpot – at that time in October 2015, that meant that Heywood scooped a rather handsome £13.2 million.
But greater wins have been reported on the Las Vegas strip, with three of them scooped by players giving the fabled Megabucks slot a try – more on that game shortly.
A 25-year-old software engineer from California, who wanted to remain anonymous, landed the progressive jackpot that paid a welcome $39.7 million back in 2003 – by today’s exchange rate, that’s £32.5 million. If you really want to be left green with envy, the individual in question only had to wager $100 in total before hitting the winning symbols.
Two other big wins followed. Excalibur Casino on the Strip was responsible for the top prize mentioned above, while Wynn and Palace Station Casino were the next best with Megabucks payouts of their own – $35 million and $27.6 million in 2000 and 1998 respectively.
On European soil, Heywood’s gargantuan payout in 2015 didn’t quite outmatch the £15.7 million netted by a Finnish player on the Mega Fortune progressive slot, which very much lived up to its name.
Fun fact: the Finn in question wagered just 20 pence to trigger the jackpot. Some people have all the luck….
Megabucks: The Legendary Slot
When a slot game has its own TripAdvisor page, with people asking where they can play this fabled machine, you know it has crossed over into the mainstream.
In fairness, Megabucks has made headlines all over the world with the size of its payouts, and so it’s not surprising that the game has taken on almost mythical proportions.
A pretty standard progressive jackpot slot game, by all accounts, Megabucks has the advantage of being almost ubiquitous on the Las Vegas strip – therefore, the jackpot prize increases significantly every single day.
And when players catch sight of how much they can win, they decide to play Megabucks too – and so the cycle continues.
Of course, there are many thousands of slot gamers who have hard luck stories to tell about their time playing Megabucks – the number of players that have scooped its jackpot over the years are significantly less than 1%.
One of the reasons that Megabucks has enjoyed enduring popularity is that its seed value is $10 million (£8.2 Million). So, as soon as the jackpot is won, it is immediately reset at that astronomical level – there’s no waiting for the big prize to add up, and so there’s no let-up in the number of players wanting to spin its reels.
Megabucks also features a whopping 60 paylines, so it can be a fruitful slot machine even for those that don’t win the jackpot, although a relatively meagre Return to Player (RTP) rate helps to balance the books for the casinos that offer it.
To play Megabucks, you will have to head to the Las Vegas strip – there is no online alternative. But given that it has paid the three largest slot machine jackpots in history, it sees like a fair enough reason to dig out your passport and suitcase.