Your Guide to Progressive Jackpot Pokies
Every pokie player in the world dreams of winning a life-changing prize. Progressive jackpot pokies turn those dreams into reality.
Gambling jackpots are not a new concept. Sports betting sites offer jackpots on specific betting markets. Online casinos have jackpots for blackjack, roulette, and Caribbean Stud. Progressive jackpot pokies are something else, however.
US$39 million is the biggest-ever prize won on a poker machine. The win happened on the Megabucks machine at Excalibur Casino in Las Vegas. A young software engineer played a US$100 stake and hit the jackpot, literally.
The progressive jackpot pokies you find at our online casino partners do not have jackpots of that magnitude, but they do run into several hundred thousand dollars, sometimes even more.
How Do Progressive Jackpot Pokies Work?
Progressive jackpot pokies work the same way as a traditional machine. They have standard payouts and features, but there is the added extra of a massive potential payout.
The jackpot on these pokies increases each time the machine spins, but nobody wins the jackpot. The jackpot can be for one particular casino or linked to several casinos offering the same machine. Jackpots may only increase by a few cents per spin, but those small amounts add up to huge sums over weeks and months.
Each machine has different rules for awarding its biggest prize. Hitting these jackpots is super-rare, which should not surprise you. The jackpot amount returns to a predetermined amount when it is won and never starts back at zero.
Are These Special Poker Machines Worth It?
You need to know a few things about progressive jackpot pokies before you fire up your favourite casino and start playing them.
First, hitting the progressive jackpot is a rare occurrence. So rare, in fact, that the biggest jackpots only hit a handful of times per year. Each machine is different, but the general consensus is winning one is around 1 in 50 million.
Second, the Return To Player (RTP) on these special machines is horrific. Mega Moolah, for example, has an RTP of only 88.12%. Those of you who read our weekly pokie reviews know we tell you to stay clear of anything with an RTP of less than 96%.
The jackpot is fed by the money players spend on the machine. The casinos do not use their own profit to pay out, so they give less money back to the play. An 88.12% RTP equates to a house edge of 11.82%, which is enormous. Mega Moolah’s biggest win to date weighs in at $23.32 million. You will not care about unfavourable odds if you pad your bankroll with a prize that size.
Third, the minimum bets for progressive jackpot pokies are high. Mega Moolah, for example, again, has a minimum bet size of $6.25. Mega Moolah Isis commands a $12.50 spin before it considers paying out its jackpot. These bets are massive if you usually play for $0.10 or $0.25 per spin. Combine the larger stakes, dreadfully low RTP, and the extreme long shot of hitting the jackpot, and you have the recipe for a bankroll-sapping experience.
Which Are The Best Jackpot Pokies
It isn’t easy to list which progressive jackpot pokies are best because everyone has different preferences. We can, however, tell the names of the machines that hold records for the biggest jackpot wins.
Mega Fortune by NetEnt paid out €17,861,800 to a man in Finland on January 20, 2013. Winning this amount of money is incredible in its own right, but the winner won it from a €0.25 bet!
A British man by the name of Jonathan Heywood hit the jackpot on the Mega Moolah machine. The Microgaming-powered pokie awarded Heywood an incredible £13.2 million on October 6, 2015.
Jackpots awarded by those pokies feature in the five biggest online jackpots ever won. It makes sense to play them if you are chasing a big progressive jackpot pokies win.
