Winning BIG with Progressive Slots
Progressive slot machines are slots with jackpots that get progressively bigger over time.
Play an ordinary (or old) slot machine and you’re limited in your payouts to what the machine itself pays. Get three cherries in a row with a max bet and you’ll win whatever’s posted on the machine. While winning with three cherries is enjoyable, it’s not the life changing jackpot you’ll get from progressive slots. Unlike the slot machines with a fixed jackpot, progressive slots have a top prize that keeps growing until a lucky winner hits the big one.
Any casino that offers the biggest jackpot has an advantage over its competition (although many times, the biggest progressive jackpots are actually shared by several casinos). Progressive slots allow casinos to offer jackpots in the millions of dollars without putting a major strain on their budget. By linking slot machines together, the cost to build the jackpot is shared by many players (sometimes thousands). Each play of the machine donates a small fraction of the bet to the jackpot as they play. If you ever look toward a group of machines and see the jackpot continually rise by a few pennies, then you’re probably looking at progressive slot machines.
Casinos know it’s better to have ten linked slot machines to a “One Million Dollar Jackpot” than to advertise ten machines with a “Hundred Thousand dollar jackpot”. Would you rather play for a million or one tenth of a million? Since one million dollars (or more) is a large amount, casinos use the shared slot trick.
So how do you win the progressive jackpot? Most slot machines make you bet the maximum bet to for a chance at the progressive jackpot. If you’re at the nickel slots, you may have to hit the “Times 20” button for a chance. Other machines may force you to bet all the available lines. Plus, you have to hit the rarest combination on the machine.
So is it worth it to bet twenty times the normal amount? If you win, then yes! Ask the lady who hit the progressive jackpot in Vegas but didn’t bet the max. She won $100,000 dollars, but another dollar on the bet would have given her over one million dollars. Elmer Sherwin certainly thinks it’s worth it to bet the max. He’s the first person to win the Megabucks jackpot twice. His 2008 jackpot was 21.1 million and the previous jackpot from 1989 is 4.6 million.
Progressive jackpots can be great fun but also frustrating. There’s nothing worse than hitting a jackpot and knowing you ‘lost’ most of your jackpot because you didn’t play the max bet. If this drives you crazy, play a few games of regular slots and set aside some for a chance at your “life changing” jackpot.
