A prize that comes out of the game's own arithmetic

About half the jackpots in an online casino never grow by a penny, and the proportion is an impression of ours rather than a count. The half which does not grow is also the half that almost nobody writes about, which is why we have given it a page of its own.

A "fixed" jackpot is a named prize of a predetermined amount, or a predetermined multiple of the active stake, funded from inside the payout model of the game itself (the definition is a database's rather than a supplier's, but no supplier contradicts it). It takes nothing out of a shared "pot", it has no seed, and it has nothing to reset to, because it never climbs in the first place.

A "progressive", by contrast, is a growing common pool fed by a fraction of every stake placed across a network, with no ceiling in theory, and it restarts at a "seed" (the figure a level returns to) each time somebody collects it.

The practical difference is not a matter of scale, though it is almost always presented as one. A fixed prize does not depend on the "liquidity" of a network, on the number of players sitting in other countries, or on how long some counter has been climbing. It depends on the "paytable" in front of you, which makes it the only jackpot in a casino that you can work out for yourself.

What it costs you in return, as the comparison on fixed or progressive sets out, is nothing at all, and that is the whole of its advantage. It is also a larger advantage than the sums involved would suggest.

The only official list in the business

One large supplier publishes a list of its fixed jackpot games, and exactly one. Pragmatic Play keeps a "Fixed Jackpots" category on its own site (the list below is taken from that page unchanged), states the mechanic in a sentence, and names the titles which carry it.

The mechanic as the supplier words it is worth quoting, because it settles two questions at once: a win "pays a predetermined multiple of the player's total bet", it can land "on any spin", and its size "is not influenced by other players or by network activity". The last clause is the one that distinguishes the entire category.

The category is given as thirty-four titles, and the names we were able to transcribe from it come to thirty-three (we read the page on 18 October 2026), which is a discrepancy worth reporting rather than closing. We reproduce the thirty-three because no other supplier offers anything that is comparable, and because the names are the only way by which a reader will find the games at all. The missing one we would rather leave missing than invent.

• 5 Lion Gold
• Aztec Gems Deluxe
• Book of Kingdoms
• Bounty Gold
• Caishen's Gold
• Caishen's Cash
• Chilli Heat
• Congo Cash
• Cosmic Cash
• Diamond Strike
• Firebird Spirit
• Fire 88
• Fire Strike
• Fire Strike 2
• Great Rhino
• Great Rhino Deluxe
• Lucky New Year
• Money Mouse
• Monkey Warrior
• Mustang Gold
• Panda's Fortune
• Pirate Gold
• Pirate Gold Deluxe
• Pyramid King
• Queenie
• Santa
• Temujin Treasures
• The Amazing Money Machine
• The Ultimate 5
• Wild Spells
• Wild Wild Riches Megaways
• Wolf Gold
• Mystery of the Orient

The documented cases outside that list

Wolf Gold is the most useful of the thirty-four and also the most confusing, because it is the one game that carries both kinds of prize at once. There are fixed jackpots inside its reels, and a place on Pragmatic Play's network "Power Jackpot" (the only title on that network, and the subject of a divided prize we describe on when a pot is worth chasing).

Its fixed "Mega" pays 1,000 times the stake for filling all fifteen moon positions in the "Money Respin" (a secondary source, but a specific one), while the published return is 96.00 per cent and the game was released on 27 April 2017. Two lower figures circulate for it, a Mini at 30x and a Major at 100x, and those reach us from player reviews rather than from a paytable, so we print them as unverified and would be glad to be corrected.

Three further games are documented well enough to name. Jokerizer, at Yggdrasil, pays a fixed "mystery win" of 6,000 coins for three jokers in line and between 1,000 and 6,000 for scattered ones, on a published return of 98 per cent (released 29 November 2014, and the highest return of any fixed jackpot game we found). Fountain of Youth, at Playtech, pays a fixed maximum of 800 times the stake at a return of 96.81 per cent (released on 21 December 2015), and because several sites list it among the progressives it is worth saying that it is not one.

Two progressive games carry fixed prizes alongside the pool, which is a third arrangement again. Fruit Fiesta pays a flat 9,000 coins when five wilds land on a line that does not qualify for its jackpot, and Icy Wonders a flat 7,500 for the five "walrus wilds" (the game is "Icy Wonders", and the "Icy Wilds" that appears on several lists is not in the NetEnt catalogue at all).

The cap that is not a jackpot

Here is where the subject goes wrong, and it goes wrong in a way that costs a reader real money if he acts on it. A "max win cap" is the ceiling of a game's payout mathematics (the largest multiple the reels can produce by any route at all), and one of the databases we read states the position in five words: a game's max-win cap "is not automatically a jackpot".

A fixed jackpot is something narrower, because it is a "named prize" with a "trigger condition" of its own, announced as a jackpot by the supplier, and reachable by one route rather than by whichever combination happens to pay most.

The distinction matters because the two numbers differ by an order of magnitude, and because the larger of them is the one that gets advertised. A slot with a maximum win of 50,000 times the stake is routinely described as a slot with a fixed jackpot of 50,000x (the phrasing is common enough that we expect a reader to have met it), and it is nothing of the kind!

Where the databases go wrong, and by how much

SlotCatalog is the clearest instance, and we are not picking on it: it is better than most, and its mistake is visible only because it publishes enough to be checked. It keeps a category of fixed jackpot games with twenty-eight unique titles in it (twenty-eight when we read it), and in the jackpot column it publishes no amount whatever; what it publishes there is the maximum win.

The two leaders of that list, Bling Bling Penguin from Ino Games and Andvari: The Magic Ring from Foxium, are both given at 13,500 times the stake, on returns of 96.5 and 96.05 per cent (the returns are the database's own figures). Below them come Bucks And Doe 10K Ways at 6,116x (Reel Play), Emperor Mystery at 5,700x (Bluberi), Lock It Link Diamonds at 5,555x (Light & Wonder), Treasures of Kilauea at 5,000x, Cai Fu Emperor Ways at 4,300x (Atomic Slot Lab) and Gods of Ireland at 1,087x (Red Rake).

We print those figures for transparency and with the label they deserve: they are maximum wins and not jackpots; the only honest answer to the question of which game has the largest fixed jackpot is that no reliable ranking exists at all. The highest multiplier verified on a primary or near-primary source remains the 1,000x of Wolf Gold.

One entry on that list deserves a flag rather than a verdict. A game called Treasures of Kilauea appears there, credited to PearFiction at a return of 96.35 per cent, while a title of the same name appears in the Mega Moolah network at a base return of 81.42. The sources do not tell us whether these are one game or two, and we would rather say that plainly than guess at it!

Table games, which are almost never fixed

A reader who has met fixed jackpots on slots may expect to find them on the tables, and the expectation is wrong: table games with jackpots are nearly always progressives attached to a "side bet", and the fixed element sits underneath the top prize rather than replacing it.

Caribbean Stud Poker is the canonical arrangement, and its "ladder" is half proportional and half fixed. A royal flush collects the whole of the counter and a straight flush 10 per cent of it (the two proportional rungs), while below those two the rungs are "flat sums": $500 for four of a kind, $100 for a full house and $50 for a flush, on the paytable that is common in the United States.

Those lower rungs are fixed jackpots in everything but their name, and because they are flat they behave in the opposite way from the counter above them; the larger the progressive grows, the smaller a share of the total value they represent. The amounts also vary by jurisdiction, and the tables in Macao and in Adelaide are not the tables in the United States.

The Games Global catalogue has seven table games with progressives attached (we counted them in the trackers), and the state of them is a lesson in liquidity rather than in mechanics. Roulette Mega Moolah, built on the network of the same name, is the only one still paying; Roulette Royale, Cyberstud Poker, Poker Ride, Triple Sevens Blackjack, Jackpot Deuces and SupaJax have gone between three and eleven years without a win apiece, as the first generation sets out game by game.

Three casinos with fixed and pooled games

• The HippodromeGambling Commission account 39372, Betway Limited, white label in the public register · MGA/CRP/130/2006Visit
• Big Thunder SlotsGambling Commission account 39175, Jumpman Gaming Ltd · Alderney AGCC outside Great BritainVisit
• Crystal SlotsGambling Commission account 39175, Jumpman Gaming Ltd · Alderney AGCC outside Great BritainVisit

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