Why Progressive Jackpot Slots Beat Regular Slots

A Data-Driven Look at RTP, Volatility, and Real Jackpot Odds

I’ve often heard the opinion that recreational players should avoid progressive jackpot slots, since the variance is huge and the odds of hitting the jackpot are microscopic. And while that sounds logical on the surface, the devil, as always, is in the details.

Jackpot slots differ wildly from one another.

Some slots with multi-million jackpots really do have a base RTP (excluding the jackpot) below 90%, for example Hall of Gods and Mega Fortune. But there are others that are far more pleasant to play.¹

Mega Joker, my favorite

Mega Joker has a 99% RTP, 96% of which comes from the base game and 3% from the progressive jackpot. The jackpot here is far easier to hit than the max win on most regular slots.

• At a €1 stake, the odds of hitting the jackpot are 1 in 500,000

• Jackpot values range from €2,000 to €20,000 and up², which translates to wins of 2,000x to 20,000x

For comparison:

• x15,000 on Gates of Olympus 1000: 1 in 2,749,771

• x15,000 on the new Big Dog House: 1 in 17,953,321 on average

This slot never runs a “watered down” RTP version. You can always be sure you’re playing with the best possible odds. And if you only play when the jackpot exceeds 20,000, the slot’s RTP hits 100%, though we’ll come back to that.

To be fair, there are downsides too. First, you need to play with optimal strategy: betting the right size in the supermeter and cashing out at the right time. Play it without optimal strategy and you can end up with an RTP as low as 85%.

The short version of optimal strategy: never cash out below 1,600 in the supermeter³ (160x the stake), and always keep playing the supermeter until you hit 1,600⁴

This makes the game more volatile, since you never get small wins below 160x. Even so, it’s comparable to regular slots: SD 13.21 versus SD 13.0 for the classic Dog House

That said, this is a very specific game. You have to make a decision on every single spin, so you can’t just set it to autoplay and walk away. On top of that, the 2003-era graphics might feel dull to a lot of players today.

To be fair, there's a bit of a paradox here: this is one of my favorite slots, and yet I don't actually play it myself anymore.

For one, I rarely play without an edge, and when I do have an edge, I have people who play for me. Grinding a $10 max bet without an autoclicker for several days straight is not exactly my idea of fun.

Divine Fortune

Another popular NetEnt slot is Divine Fortune, which has personally brought me no shortage of pain, suffering, and profit. The return to player here is almost 2.5% lower than Mega Joker, though still within the normal range for the market. If anything, Mega Joker was the outlier, not this one.

Half a Million in One Session.

96.59% RTP, of which 4.07% of the base RTP goes to the jackpot. The odds of winning here are tougher, but the wins themselves are bigger and more realistic than a lot of max wins on regular slots. Judge for yourself.

The odds of hitting the jackpot are 1 in 2,686,500 at a 1 euro stake, which is still better than the odds of landing 15,000x on Gates of Olympus.

Even compared against DOA 2, the benchmark slot for big multiplier wins, the numbers hold up. DOA 2's 111,111x hits at a frequency of 1 in 44M⁵. Divine Fortune's jackpot, playing at 20 cents a spin, hits at 1 in 13.4M, which for a 143,374 jackpot, as shown on the screenshot, is equivalent to a 716,870x win, or a 100,000x win for a 20,000 jackpot, the size the jackpot lands at in 90.4% of cases.

There's also Mercy of the Gods, which is almost an exact copy of Divine Fortune, and Vegas Nights, which has close to double the jackpot odds of Mega Joker, with jackpot sizes in a similar range.