Slot machines are often seen as unpredictable, but there’s more to their odds than pure luck. While jackpot odds can fall between 1 in 5,000 and 1 in 34 million, understanding what drives those numbers can help you make smarter choices.
Understanding Slot Machine Odds
Several design elements and game mechanics influence how likely you are to hit a jackpot:
• Game Type: Classic three-reel slots offer better odds than multi-reel progressive jackpots. Progressives link multiple machines or casinos, creating enormous prize pools — but those bigger payouts come with steeper odds.
• Jackpot Size: Machines with modest jackpots usually have better odds. For example, smaller prizes may appear once in 1 in 5,000 spins, while huge progressives like Megabucks can have odds nearing 1 in 49.8 million.
• Number of Reels and Symbols: The more possible combinations, the harder it is to land a jackpot. Machines with more reels or symbols are designed to make top payouts less frequent.
• Random Number Generators (RNGs): Each spin is entirely random, meaning previous outcomes have no bearing on future results — streaks, patterns, or “lucky machines” are purely coincidental.
Popular Jackpot Odds Explained
• Standard Slots (Non-progressive): Odds for the top prize usually fall between 1 in 5,000 and 1 in 1 million.
• Progressive Jackpot Slots: Depending on the jackpot size, odds can range from 1 in 1 million to 1 in 34 million.
• Megabucks (Nevada Progressive): With a jackpot over $20 million, odds are roughly 1 in 49.8 million.
• Mega Moolah: Famous for record-breaking wins, this game has awarded payouts topping $20 million.
How Often Do Slot Machines Payout?
While jackpot odds can feel daunting, slot machines are programmed to meet strict payout regulations. Known as Return to Player (RTP) rates, these percentages represent how much a machine pays back over time. RTP typically ranges between 85% and 99%, ensuring casinos maintain their edge while giving players a reasonable chance of winning.
What Can Players Take Away From This?
Winning a massive jackpot is rare, but smaller wins are far more common. Slots with smaller payouts tend to hit more frequently, while huge progressive jackpots demand longer odds. By choosing games that align with your goals — whether that’s frequent payouts or the thrill of chasing a life-changing prize — you can improve your overall experience.
Key Factors That Influence Slot Machine Wins
Return to Player (RTP) and Its Impact
Before talking about RTP, let’s understand that all online slot games use random number generators (RNGs) to generate the winning jackpot combination. You can do nothing to force the RNGs to produce a jackpot win. Similarly, there’s no strategy you can use to help in pushing the RNGs to pay a jackpot.
RNGs are designed to ensure jackpot wins are random and come at unpredictable times, giving every player the same odds of winning. As such, slot machines can hit the jackpot twice in a row. The opposite is true – the jackpot may not hit at all for 30000, 70000, or even 1 million slot machine spins.
However, the average rate at which the slot machines produce the jackpot depends on a theoretical payback percentage called the return to player (RTP). This figure is advertised or labeled on the slot machine by the manufacturer, designer, or the casino itself. The RTP is usually found in the slot machine’s pay table, which tells you the expected percentage return of money you spend playing a casino slot game.
For instance, the stated RTP of the popular progressive slot game Mega Moolah by Microgaming is around 90%, meaning you should expect to get roughly $90 back for every $100 you bet on it over a long period of time. That means the expected loss is $3 for every $100 put into the slot game over an extended period of play.
The RTP can also indicate the probability and how often you can expect to win the jackpot. More specifically, a slot machine with a higher RTP tends to pay out the jackpot more often than one with a lower return to player percentage.
And that is evident in reality. For instance, Mega Fortune, with an average 96.6% RTP, usually pays out its jackpot more frequently than the Arabian Nights slot, with a reported RTP of 95.22%. Although the two progressive jackpot slots come from the same developer, NetEnt, Mega Fortune holds the Guinness World Record for producing the most prominent online jackpot payout of €2.6 million in mid-2020.
Volatility: How Risk Affects Wins
While the return to player percentage will give you a rough idea about the probability of the slot machine paying out, volatility will tell you the expected time for the jackpot to hit.
Essentially, volatility determines the short-term risk of playing a particular slot machine. That is because the risk involved (how much money you will lose before winning) in slot machines increases with their volatility. Unsurprisingly, the size of the jackpot prize becomes bigger as the volatility increases.
When you think about it logically, slot machines with smaller jackpots tend to pay out more often and have lower volatility. At the same time, if the volatility of the slot machine is higher, its jackpot usually will pay out less often.
You can rely on the volatility to tell you how often a particular slot machine will likely hit the jackpot. The lower the volatility, the more frequently the slot machine will theoretically hit the jackpot.
Variance: Measuring Win Patterns
Variance and volatility are often considered the same because they determine a slot machine’s winning probabilities. However, there is a slight difference between volatility and variance.
Whereas volatility indicates the win probability of the slot machine in the short term, variance tells us about the overall risk involved in playing the game over a long time. For example, a low-volatility slot is considered a frequent payer of the jackpot, but the payout size is smaller, while a low-variance slot machine carries a more negligible risk in the long term.
So, how does variance affect the rate at which the slot machine hits the jackpot? It is simple: a low-variance slot machine will hit a minor jackpot more often than a high-variance game. On the other hand, a slot machine with high variance will produce bigger jackpots in less time than a low-variance game.
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Jackpot Types and Frequency
There can be two, three, or more jackpots of varying prize pot sizes within the same slot machines. For instance, a slot machine game like Microgaming’s progressive slot Mega Moolah has four jackpot sizes: mini, minor, major, and mega jackpot. The last one is the biggest and what everybody is after.
The time it takes for the slot machine to pay out a mini jackpot is less than that for the minor jackpot, which pays out more frequently than the major and mega jackpots.
Moreover, there are many slot machine jackpot types, and their payout rates vary depending on the specific type…
- Local jackpots – As the name suggests, local jackpots pool together money spent by players playing the slot machine within the same casino. If no one plays the slot machine in that casino, the size of the local jackpot won’t grow. For that reason, the jackpot is more likely to hit when many people play the slot machine in that particular casino.
- Fixed jackpots – This type of jackpot helps solve the primary issue of local jackpots: lack of popularity. Instead of the prize pot expanding depending on the number of people playing the slot machine, the amount of the jackpot is decided at the start and remains the same until it is won. The jackpot stays fixed at $50,000, $250,000, etc., regardless of how many players put money into the slot machine.
- Progressive jackpots are the most common and widely available slot machine jackpots, found both online and at land-based casinos. A small percentage of the bet amount is put into the jackpot prize pot each time someone wagers on the progressive slot machine. One progressive jackpot can be found in different types of slot machines so that the prize pot can balloon quickly to the millions.
- Network jackpots – This kind of jackpot pools bets placed by players on the same slot machine across many different gambling sites and casinos. For instance, all of the bets on Mega Moolah across all casinos with slot machines will contribute to the prize pot.
How often do progressive jackpots hit?
How often progressive jackpots hit depends primarily on the slot game. Some progressive jackpots hit weekly, while others are won only a few times in a year.
For instance, the Mega Fortune progressive slot by NetEnt pays out an average jackpot of €3,950,534, and the payout frequency is every 11 weeks.
Meanwhile, Microgaming’s Mega Moolah pays out its mega jackpot after an average of every two months (or after around every 61 days).
Funnily, some progressive jackpots could take months, if not years, before they hit. For example, there was a slot machine in Las Vegas whose progressive jackpot didn’t hit for a whopping two decades. That’s 20 years of players waiting for the progressive jackpot to hit!
How Progressive Jackpots Work?
You probably are aware of how progressive jackpot slots work. Even if you are a newbie trying to cut your teeth in slot gambling, you can learn the nitty-gritty of progressive slot jackpots in minutes. We don’t want to dive deep into the inner workings of progressive slots, as it is probably not what you came here for. But if you aren’t sure, we shall briefly go through the nuts and bolts.
First, progressive jackpot games are video slots with odds in many sizes and shapes. You can scoop a minor jackpot of roughly twice your stake up to a million-dollar mega jackpot. So, a good return on your investment or enough funds to keep your bankroll for years to come is possible.
As far as how progressive jackpots work is concerned, that depends on the type of slot game. Some progressive slots pay a lucky player a vast jackpot when an RNG randomly identifies them as the winner. Meanwhile, other progressive slots will give the maximum payout to a punter for landing a present number of symbols in a specific pay line.
More often than not, these progressive slots have a jackpot shared across different online casinos. But this isn’t always the case. Some jackpot games only increase within a particular casino or group of casinos owned by the same operator.
For the most part, these games require the bettor to bet max in order to qualify for the top prize. Both online and land-based slot games with progressive jackpots have gained immense traction with those pursuing big payouts.
This is because these progressive slots can pay out a massive sum of money when you land the jackpot. For instance, a lucky punter landed nearly a whopping $39 million on the popular jackpot game Megabucks in 2003.
Standard Jackpot Hit Frequency
How often a slot machine hits the jackpot varies, depending mainly on the type of slot machine. Some slot machines hit the jackpot as often as every day, while others may take several weeks, months, or even years before they pay out the jackpot.
The frequency at which a slot machine delivers the jackpot will differ based on three core factors…
- RTP of the slot machine – Slot machines with a high return to player percentage usually hit the jackpot more often.
- Volatility & variance of the slot machine – If the volatility is high, the slot machine will hit the jackpot less often. Likewise, a low volatility slot machine will frequently pay out the jackpot.
- Size of the jackpot – Smaller jackpots tend to hit more often than larger jackpots. For instance, the hit frequency of the mini jackpot in Mega Moolah is more than that of the minor jackpot. Also, the Mega Moolah’s major jackpot hit more often than the mega jackpot.
Why Don’t Casinos Use $10 Bills?
People don’t use $10 bills in casinos because the bill cassettes and cash hoppers in the slot machines and other gaming units do not have the required space. Besides, $10 bills are easily confused with $100 bills, which can be a massive nightmare for casinos when controlling and accounting for winnings.
The same goes for dimes and sometimes $50 bills. Game developers and casinos build cassettes and hoppers for the most popular denominations for change, such as nickels, quarters, and $20 bills.
From past statistics, casinos have noted that players don’t use $10 bills and dimes as often as they do nickels, quarters, and 20-dollar bills.
How often does a slot machine payout?
There is circumstantial evidence that a slot machine is designed to pay the maximum win every 30 to 60 days. Maximum payouts can take up to 219 days in some slot machines. Note that game developers and gaming authorities don’t support this claim. They maintain that a legal slot machine is truly random and that any day is good for a max payout.
What are the odds of winning a progressive jackpot?
The odds of winning a progressive jackpot vary from one jackpot to the next. However, on average, the odds of winning a progressive jackpot like Mega Moolah or Mega Fortune are 50 million to 1.
