Winning money at a casino is always exciting. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve finished a blackjack session ahead of a little or hit a slot for a hundred euros – it’s still a thrill.
For many people, that’s enough. But everyone is tempted, at least once in a while, by those colorful, always-increasing displays on casino websites showing progressive slot jackpots paying out €2,432,985…€2,433,043…€2,433,386…
That’s not just exciting. That’s life-changing money. If a possibility like that intrigues you, it could be how to choose your first online casino: the progressive jackpot opportunities.
What’s A Progressive Jackpot?
Brick-and-mortar casinos have been using the lure of multi-million euro payouts to attract customers for years. When online casinos became popular, they quickly adopted the technique, offering progressive slot payouts to entice new players – and keep existing players chasing after big money.
Casinos make lots of money on the promotion because it isn’t won very often. But gambling, for many people, is all about chasing a dream. And for many, a seven-figure payout is a dream worth pursuing.
People often say “I like to gamble for the fun and entertainment, not for the money.” But, what if you could have both?
The idea behind a progressive jackpot is simple. Numerous slot machines (occasionally, table games) are linked together electronically, and every time someone makes a bet on any of the machines, a small amount of the bet is placed into a separate pot.
That’s where the name “progressive” comes from; even though the individual machines still pay out on their usual pay tables, the different jackpot progressively gets larger and larger as people play their machines until someone eventually wins big money. The odds of winning a progressive jackpot are tiny, so the combined pot can reach incredibly high amounts, usually well over a million euros before it’s finally claimed.
At brick and mortar casinos, the slot machines linked together can be in different casinos over a large area. For online gaming rooms, the progressive jackpots are usually administered by the big firms that manufacture the gaming software (like Microgaming) and run throughout the world.
As you’d expect, the more people who are playing on linked progressive machines, the higher the jackpot will get and the faster it will increase. For that reason, the progressives are usually the most popular slots in an online casino.
There are a few other things you should know before we give you some tips on how to choose your first online casino by checking the size of their progressive jackpots. First, the vast majority of slots in an internet gaming room are not progressives; it will be easy to find the ones that are but don’t expect that you’ll be shooting for seven figures whenever you play a slot machine.
Second, you can’t win the jackpot unless you’re playing the maximum number of coins. If you’re a gambler, there’s no worse feeling than “hitting” a jackpot and then realizing that you didn’t play the max bet.
Third, jackpots are often paid in the advertised currency, no matter what currency you’re using – if that’s the case for the game you’re playing, it means that if you can play with “cheaper” dollars or pounds instead of “more expensive” euros, you’re giving yourself better odds.
And finally, your chances of winning a progressive jackpot are tiny; in fact, your odds of winning the lottery are twice as good. But if you have the money to gamble, why not think big? You still play the lottery once in a while, right?
The Top 3 Progressive Jackpots Online
We won’t list the exact amount of each of these progressive jackpots since, as you understand by now, their value has already changed since you started reading this sentence. But here are the top five online progressive jackpots, to help you choose your first online casino.
- Mega Fortune
- Mega Moolah ISIS
- Cosmic Fortune
