Casino Jackpots

If you're an online casino fan, and you think of the biggest payouts, then you're probably thinking about some kind of progressive jackpot. While most of them these days are based around slots, there are a number available on other games like blackjack and video poker. What's more is that they can sometimes offer situations where you actually have a long-term advantage against the casino because the jackpots are build up with a portion of the funds from each bet made on the game instead of coming directly from the site itself.

Different Types of Progressive Jackpots

There are a few main types of jackpots that fall under this category. A networked jackpot link or pooled jackpot involves a game that pools together a single jackpot from multiple online casinos. This means that the prizes will run up faster, but they'll also be won quicker when they do build up because so many more people will be getting in on the action. You can also have a linked jackpot from multiple games, such as the Marvel Jackpots series from Playtech where a number of games based on characters from the Marvel Universe all build up the same set of four progressives.

On the other hand, you can have more localized prize pools that are only build up from a single operator. The way this affects things is that the jackpots will build up slower since fewer individuals are contributing, but you'll have better chances of being the one to hit it once it reaches a certain level for the same reason.

Biggest Names in the Business

A handful of different jackpots are widely considered the biggest in the industry. Each software company tends to have one progressive that stands out among the crowd for being it's largest. For Microgaming, it's the Mega Moolah jackpot. Mega Fortune is the one for Net Entertainment, and Beach Life takes the cake for Playtech. All of these games have regularly paid out millions of dollars in individual prizes to the biggest online slot winners, but Mega Fortune stands out as holding the world record.

At the time of this writing, a payout worth €17.8 million on the Mega Fortune jackpot by Net Entertainment holds the world record for the single-largest online casino win in history.

Profitable Opportunities

Something really interesting about the progressive approach for top jackpots is that it can create situations where it's profitable to play an online casino game in the long run. While the volatility is pretty high with this approach, there are actually teams of players who do this as a profession by targeting only jackpots that have grown large enough to be profitable. By splitting their winnings fairly, they're able to eliminate a lot of the variance in this approach.

For example, suppose you have a game with a house advantage of 94 percent when its jackpot is reset to $100,000. For every additional $100,000 added to that jackpot, suppose the house edge decreases by one percent. Once this jackpot reached the $700,000 level, it would actually be break even to bet on the game, and when it increased past the $700,000 level, the edge would actually go to the player. A 101 percent payout rate would be achieved with a jackpot of $800,000, and so on.

Jackpots