Video poker, bingo and the jackpots nobody writes about
Progressive video poker, the side bets that are really lotteries and the small pools that pay every few hours make up the rest of the catalogue. It is the half with no records in it and, in the case of bingo, with no network at all (we looked).
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Two houses carrying the catalogues described below
The two houses below are placed by the authority whose register we were able to read, and a commission does not move anybody up the page. Each button is an affiliate link, and what you get on a card is a licence and a list of networks.
- 1
Grand Hotel Casino
Malta Gaming Authority · Kahnawake
Jackpots: Mega Moolah, WowPot!
- Sterling accounts only, on the Apricot platform with the Games Global library
- In the Malta register and on the Kahnawake list of permit holders
- One of the Casino Rewards addresses feeding the global Mega Moolah pool
Visit Grand Hotel Casino18+ · Sponsored link · Terms on the operator's site
- 2
UK Casino Club
Malta Gaming Authority · Kahnawake · registered as "ukcasino club" in the Gambling Commission register
Jackpots: Mega Moolah, WowPot!
- A sterling address, on Apricot, with the Games Global jackpot titles in the lobby
- In the Malta and Kahnawake registers, under the trading name the register itself records
- Sterling accounts, so the seeds it shows are the pound thresholds
Visit UK Casino Club18+ · Sponsored link · Terms on the operator's site
What is left when the slots and the tables have been taken out
Three things, and one absence. The remainder of the jackpot catalogue is progressive "video poker" (a machine dealing five cards against a published paytable), a handful of side bets that are really lotteries bolted onto a slot, and several dozen small pools banded by stake or tied to a clock. The absence is bingo, which has no documented jackpot network of its own (none that we could find anywhere).
This is the part of the subject nobody writes about. The reason is not hard to see, since there are no eight-figure prizes anywhere in it and no records worth repeating. What there is instead is the clearest evidence on this whole site of what happens to a progressive when the players leave, and of what a jackpot looks like when it is working exactly as intended.
We have set the figures for the two halves of that picture side by side, because the contrast is the argument: one family has paid nothing at all for years, while the other pays every few hours, in three figures, and nobody has ever written a headline about it.
Progressive video poker, which is the part of this trade that stopped
Two titles, and that is the whole of it. Jackpot Deuces and SupaJax are Games Global titles of the opening era of online progressives (1998 to 2006), and we found no progressive video poker launched by anybody since.
Jackpot Deuces last paid its jackpot three years and eleven weeks ago, and the largest prize it has ever given anybody was $120,857. Its "counter" (the running total shown in the lobby) now stands 394 per cent above the mean of the prizes it has itself paid, so it has passed its own record by a wide margin and is still standing there.
SupaJax last paid three years and seven weeks ago, with a largest prize of $124,096 and a counter 205 per cent clear of the same mean, so that the sentence can be written twice over with different numbers. That is what we mean when we say that a part of the trade has stopped; it was not withdrawn and it was not announced, and it is simply unvisited.
The paradox underneath is worth a line of its own, because video poker is one of the few families in a casino where the "break-even" point (the level at which a wager stops being a losing one) can be computed exactly, the deck and the schedule of payments both being matters of public record, and it is precisely the family nobody is playing!
The side bet that was a lottery, and is now closed
Dollar Ball was the strangest jackpot Playtech ever ran, and it was not a jackpot of the slot at all: it was a lottery attached to one. A player chose five numbers between 1 and 49 (or let the machine choose for him), and when five were drawn at every spin of the host slot, and one, two or three matches paid fixed prizes while four paid a share of the pot and five paid the whole of it.
The pot restarted at a "seed" of €10,000, and across 81 recorded wins it averaged €57,446, which works out at roughly one win every seven weeks; the smallest recorded win was €11,273. What the "side bet" (the extra stake placed beside the spin) cost per spin was never published at all, which is a gap worth noting when the whole appeal of the bet was its price.
It is now closed, since the tracker that followed it declares the jackpot "no longer available to be won", with the value frozen where it stood, and the date of that closure is not published by anybody that we could find.
Its record is unsettled as well, which is a fitting end for it: one database gives €100,808 (8 July 2015), the same database gives $113,296 on 22 April 2014 in its dollar listing, and an affiliate gives $113,296 on 22 August 2014. Three dates for one record, and no way at all to choose between them!
The small pools, where jackpots actually work
Jackpot Bells is the demonstration, and it is better than any argument that we could write. The same game runs four separate pools banded by stake (€25, €10, €5 and €2), and the pool fed by the smallest stakes falls every three days (against fourteen weeks for the one fed by the largest).
That is a statement about how many people are playing at each level rather than about the mathematics of any of them, and it is the cleanest illustration on this site of what a "pool" really is. Their largest prizes run the other way, from €112,188 on the smallest band up to €555,757 on the largest, which is exactly what anybody would expect once the first figure has sunk in.
The clock-driven pools behave in the same way, although their intervals differ: Sporting Legends pays its weekly level every seven days and fourteen hours on average (and its daily level every twenty hours and fifty-five minutes), while the three levels of Great Blue ("Whale", "Shark" and "Turtle") fall every sixteen weeks, every six days and every twenty-one hours from the top down.
Dragon Jackpot runs "Gold", "Red" and "Blue" at twelve days, seventeen hours and two hours; Grease pays its "Danny" and "Sandy" levels every eleven weeks and every ten days; the "Golden 7" and "Silver 5" of another title sit at thirty-four weeks and three weeks. None of these prizes will change anybody's life, and every one of them is being paid.
The same supplier's larger pools (the ones you would actually notice) are where the silence is, because Thai Temple last paid eleven years and seven weeks ago, Kingdoms Rise Epic four years and fifty-one weeks ago, Esmeralda for two years and twenty-two weeks, Pyramid of Ramesses for two years and twelve weeks, and the top Sporting Legends level for two years and eight weeks.
Read the two lists together and the rule writes itself. A pool pays at the speed of the money going into it, and a pool attached to one title, in one country, at one stake level, has a timetable set by however many people happen to be sitting at it this month.
Bingo, and the jackpot network that does not exist
We looked for a progressive bingo network and did not find one, since no supplier publishes a bingo jackpot pool, no tracker follows one, and the trade press that we read does not describe one. What exists instead is bingo brands carrying the slot networks (Blueprint's in at least one case), which is a different proposition wearing the same word.
A licensed British bingo site lists a Jackpot King slot among its games, and one British licence we read covers remote casino and bingo together under a single permit. So a "bingo jackpot" in an online casino is, in practice, a slot jackpot that you reach from a bingo lobby, and the pot behind it belongs to Blueprint or to Games Global rather than to the bingo room you are sitting in.
If a supplier publishes a bingo pool with a seed and a "contribution" (the proportion of each bet diverted into it) we will add it to the table on our networks page and say so plainly. Until then the honest answer to the question is that there is nothing there, which is a different thing from saying that nobody is selling one.
Three things in circulation that belong nowhere on this page
Jackpot Party is named as a jackpot network on a surprising number of lists, and it is a free-to-play "social casino" on the app stores (Google Play and the App Store), with no real-money pool of any kind. The confusion is understandable and the correction is one sentence long.
One supplier's catalogue is described by its own source as having no "pooled progressives" in one paragraph and as carrying progressive jackpot titles in another, so we treat it as having no cross-operator pool established and its prizes configured by each operator.
And Jokerizer, filed among the progressives in several places, pays a fixed "mystery win" of up to 6,000 coins on a game returning 98 per cent (the highest figure we read anywhere), which makes it the highest return anywhere in this document and not a progressive at all.
- The mechanism
9 weeks
How often they fall
No supplier publishes the odds of the top level. What exists is the observed interval, and it runs from two hours to eleven years.
Read more - The mechanism
0.99-7.60%
How a pot grows
What each network really takes from a stake. Everyone writes "one or two per cent"; the documented range is a factor of eight wider.
Read more
Questions we are asked about these jackpots
Questions
Is there still progressive video poker online?
Two titles, both from the first generation of online progressives, and neither has paid its jackpot for more than three years. We found no progressive video poker released by any supplier since, which makes it the one family in this subject that has stopped outright.
Is there a progressive bingo jackpot network?
Not one that anybody publishes. No supplier describes a bingo pool with a seed and a contribution, and no tracker follows one; what bingo sites carry instead are the slot networks, so the pot behind a bingo lobby belongs to a slot supplier.
What happened to Dollar Ball?
It is closed. The tracker that followed it declares the jackpot no longer available to be won, with the value frozen where it stood, and no source we read gives the date of the closure. Its record also carries three different dates across three listings.
Which jackpots pay out most often?
The small banded and clock-driven pools. One game runs four pools by stake level and the smallest of them falls every three days, while several Playtech levels fall every two hours, every seventeen hours or every twenty-one hours, in three and four figures.
Why do the small pools pay and the big ones not?
Because a pool grows only out of the stakes placed into it, so its timetable is set by the number of people playing at that level rather than by its mathematics. The same supplier has levels falling every two hours and a level that has not fallen for eleven years.
