Every so often you hear of some lucky person winning a life-changing amount of money playing online slots. While you can win a reasonable sum playing slots, it’s the slots with progressive jackpots that offer the huge cash prizes, which can be six, seven or even eight figures.
Of course, the chances of winning such huge, life-changing amounts of money are extremely low, but landing such a win isn’t impossible. So just what are progressive jackpots?
How progressive jackpots work
Most slots have a jackpot whose cash prize is a fixed amount of money. No matter how much you play or wager, this amount of money won’t change. If a slot has a progressive jackpot, the cash prize grows every time a player makes a wager.
A small amount of money from the wager, usually 1% of its total amount, goes towards the progressive jackpot. The remaining 99% of the wager is used as normal. If several people are playing the same progressive jackpot at the same time, all of their wagers will contribute to the jackpot.
The jackpot keeps on growing until a player wins it. The more players have placed wagers, the higher the jackpot will get. The requirements needed to win the jackpot will vary depending on the game you’re playing. No matter what progressive jackpot you’re playing, if you win, the cash prize is awarded to you and the pool of money is reset to zero.
Sometimes, however, the jackpot is reset to a certain low amount of money (for example, $10). This is to encourage other players to make wagers.
Different types of progressive jackpots
In traditional land-based casinos, there are three main types of progressive jackpots. There are single-machine jackpots that can be played by only one person at a time; the cash prizes at these machines are therefore quite low.
Then there are jackpots with more than one machine in the same casino linked in; the cash prizes are generally bigger, as there are more players making wagers, but the chances of winning are lower.
Finally, there are some progressive jackpots that are linked to many machines in different casinos; these can offer the biggest cash prizes as there can be hundreds of people wagering on them at any given time.
As for online slots, there are games that have their own progressive jackpot and games that share a progressive jackpot with numerous other games at the same casino or even across numerous casinos.
There are no restrictions on how many people can play an online game at the same time. You should therefore find that cash prizes at online progressive jackpots rise much more quickly than the cash prizes at traditional, land-based casinos.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the most popular – and biggest – progressive jackpots available to play today. These games are loads of fun thanks to their great theming and high-quality graphics and sounds effects. Remember to always keep track of how much you’re spending when playing them. After all, you don’t want to end up spending money you don’t have. Having said all that, you never know, the next big winner could well be you.