• 1

  Blackjack Ballroom

  Malta Gaming Authority · Kahnawake

  Jackpots: Mega Moolah, WowPot!

  • A table-first address, which matters because the Games Global progressives include table games
  • Apricot and Games Global, with eCOGRA on the payouts and Fresh Horizons on the licence
  • Malta and Kahnawake, and no Ontario site, so it stays an international address
  Visit Blackjack Ballroom

  18+ · Sponsored link · Terms on the operator's site

• 2

  Players Palace

  Malta Gaming Authority · Kahnawake

  Jackpots: Mega Moolah, WowPot!

  • The Games Global library again, on Apricot, with Fresh Horizons as the operator
  • Malta and Kahnawake, with no separate site for the Canadian provinces
  • A Casino Rewards address on the same global pools
  Visit Players Palace

  18+ · Sponsored link · Terms on the operator's site

A slot with a jackpot is two games at the same time

The return of a slot with a progressive attached splits into two parts that behave very differently, and almost no page in this trade separates them. One part is the "base game" (the reels, the free spins and the bonus rounds, which is where a player's money comes back to him); the other is the "jackpot share" (the part held back for the "pot", which comes back only to whoever takes it).

Add them together and you have the "total" figure a supplier publishes. Subtract the second and you have the figure that describes what actually happens to anybody who fails to win the jackpot, which is virtually everybody, and the distance between those two numbers is the single most useful thing on this page.

There is exactly one game in this whole subject where the supplier has published both versions (with and without the pot attached), and in our view it settles the argument for the rest of them. Money Train Origins returns 96.11 per cent without the Dream Drop jackpot and 94.00 per cent with it, which makes the jackpot cost 2.11 points of return on the same reels, the same symbols and the same mathematics.

That is the price of the ticket, stated by the people who built the game (and published for both versions, which is what makes it usable). Everywhere else in this trade we have had to infer the figure from the two halves of a published total, and we say so each time rather than presenting the subtraction as a supplier's number.

What changes from one slot to another, and what does not change at all

The pot does not change. Twenty-nine titles feed the same Mega Moolah money, so a player moving between them is not moving between prizes at all: he is moving between base games that differ by nearly seven points of return, while the "contribution" (the slice of every stake that goes into the prize) stays at 5.30 per cent throughout.

The seven titles of one studio's signature series return the most of any of them, at 93.42 per cent in total on a "base" of 88.12 (the return before the jackpot share is added), and the full spread title by title is tabulated on the Mega Moolah page.

At the lower end a Megaways version of the same brand returns 86.93 on a base of 81.63, so anybody failing to win the jackpot faces a "house edge" (the operator's long-run share) above eighteen per cent on reels that look identical.

The "trigger" (whatever has to happen before the wheel appears) changes as well, and it changes by title rather than by network.

On the Mega Moolah games it fires at random on any spin that has been paid for, with no reference at all to the symbols; on the WowPot! titles the condition varies from one game to the next; on King Millions it is a "scatter" (symbols that pay wherever they land) and the chance of it firing rises with the stake.

Then there is the thing that changes least and matters most, which is the generation of the game. A slot built in the last decade qualifies for its jackpot on any real-money spin (no recent network works otherwise, as far as we could read), while a slot of the nineties may demand a "qualifying stake" you would never otherwise place!

Treasure Nile will not pay unless nine lines are covered at fifty pence apiece, which comes to £4.50, and unless five "King Tut" symbols arrive on the ninth of those lines. Fruit Fiesta asks for every one of fifteen lines (£0.75 at the most) with its five wild logos on the last of them, King Cashalot for five king wilds landing on line nine, and Arabian Nights for the maximum bet outright.

That slice comes out of every stake in either case, whether or not the stake qualifies. Anybody playing one of those three titles under the threshold is therefore funding a prize he has no route to, and all three remain open to whoever clicks on them.

How the slot catalogue is actually organised

By network, and not by theme, which is why a reader who learns nine pools has learned several hundred games. The Games Global side runs twenty-nine Mega Moolah titles (one of which is a roulette table rather than a slot), a dozen on WowPot!, six that we could document on King Millions and an unpublished number on the newest pool of the four.

Blueprint's Jackpot King is counted at "over sixty" eligible games by one licensed operator and at "almost forty" by another, which tells you that the eligible list is a decision each operator takes rather than a fact about the network itself, and we note that its Rapid Fire sister (June 2024) runs five pots across a smaller set with no published list of those either.

Relax Gaming declared "over fifty" Dream Drop titles (December 2025) while a licensed operator was still saying "over thirty", and we take both to be right at the dates they were written. Red Tiger's network was counted at 166 games on a single operator (June 2021), which is the largest participating catalogue anybody has put a number on.

Playtech runs twenty-five slots on the Age of the Gods pool, plus dozens of pools attached to single titles, and NetEnt has four jackpot slots left in distribution. That is the whole map as we read it, and nine pools of it carry almost all of the money.

The slots sold as progressives whose lower levels are fixed

This is the correction we expect to make most often, because it is documented on the suppliers' own pages and ignored almost everywhere else. On Mercy of the Gods the Minor pays a flat twenty times the stake and the Major a flat hundred times, worked out on the round that triggered them, and only the Mega is progressive at all.

On Divine Fortune the official page declares the Mega progressive and says nothing either way about the Minor and the Major, which is not at all the same thing as declaring them progressive; an absence is not a figure. Fruit Fiesta pays 9,000 coins for five wilds on a line that does not qualify, and Icy Wonders pays 7,500 coins for five walrus wilds, both of them fixed prizes sitting beside a progressive.

The practical consequence is that anybody chasing one of these games is chasing a smaller target than the marketing implies. Three of the four levels may be a multiple of his own stake, and a multiple of a stake is a prize you can calculate for yourself before you play, which no progressive will ever be.

Three titles also travel under names that their makers have never printed, and the error is worth naming because it has reached the trackers. The NetEnt game is Icy Wonders and not "Icy Wilds", while the Relax Gaming titles are Temple Tumble 2 and Money Train Origins Dream Drop rather than "Temple Tumble Dream Drop" and "Money Train Dream Drop". A search for either invented name finds pages describing a game that has never existed!

The jackpot that costs a player nothing, and the slot that carries both kinds

A "fixed" jackpot is a prize of declared size, settled as a multiple of whatever was staked and funded inside the payout model of the single game. Nothing is withdrawn from a common pool to pay for it, the figure never climbs, there is nothing to restart, and no stranger in another jurisdiction has any bearing on it, which is what makes this the one prize in a casino that you can price before you play.

One large supplier publishes an official list of them (thirty-four titles long), and we have found no other supplier that publishes one at all. The highest fixed multiple anybody has verified is a thousand times the stake (the Mega of Wolf Gold, won by filling all fifteen moon positions in its respin feature), and every figure above that in circulation turns out to be a "max win cap" rather than a jackpot.

That distinction is worth two lines of its own. A cap is the ceiling of a game's payout mathematics, while a fixed jackpot is a declared prize with a trigger condition of its own, and a database that puts 13,500x in a jackpot column has simply printed the wrong number in the wrong place.

Wolf Gold is also the one slot we know of that carries both kinds at once, since the same game hosts a network progressive and its own in-game fixed prizes (1,000x at the top), so the identical "lobby" tile can be played for two completely different propositions.

And one progressive slot returns 99 per cent in its "supermeter" mode, which is the proof that a pot need not cost 2.11 points of anything: what decides the price is how much return the supplier moves into it.

• The mechanism

  81.63%

  Reading the RTP

  A slot with a jackpot has two RTPs, and only one of them is yours unless you win. On one Mega Moolah title the base game pays 81.63 per cent.

  Read more
• 1998-2006

  9 years

  The first generation

  Cash Splash, Treasure Nile, King Cashalot. Some are still played daily; one has not paid its jackpot in over nine years.

  Read more

Questions we are asked about slot jackpots

Questions