Table game jackpots, and the side bet that pays for them
Roulette, blackjack and poker with a progressive attached are nearly always a separate wager placed beside the hand, with a fixed ladder of prizes under the pot, and they are the only jackpots in a casino whose arithmetic a player can actually finish.
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Two houses that put the tables first
The sequence follows the authority whose register we were able to read, and no part of it is bought with commission. Both buttons below are affiliate links, and what a card carries is a licence and a list of networks. No card shows an offer.
- 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 Ballroom18+ · 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
A table jackpot is a side bet, and that is almost the whole story
On a slot the jackpot is paid out of the stake you were placing anyway, but on a table game it is almost always a separate wager placed beside the hand, and the distinction changes everything about how the thing should be judged. The main game keeps its own mathematics, the "side bet" (an extra stake with its own paytable, settled independently of the hand) keeps a far worse set, and the two are priced quite differently.
The second feature of a table jackpot is that only the very top of it grows. Below the top, the "ladder" (the schedule of prizes under the jackpot itself) is a list of fixed cash figures, so a player who hits the second rung is not taking a slice of the pot: he is taking a number printed on a card, and that number has not changed since the table was installed.
That is why this page is at once shorter on arithmetic than our slot pages and far longer on it. For once the numbers can actually be worked out, and we have taken ours from a reference that publishes the full "paytables" (the complete schedules of what each hand pays) rather than from a "counter" (the live figure on the screen).
Caribbean Stud, which is the canonical case and the only one with real figures
The side bet on Caribbean Stud Poker costs a flat unit (usually one of whatever the currency is) and pays on a ladder like this one, taken from the most widely used American paytable: a "royal flush" takes 100 per cent of the progressive counter (the whole pot), a "straight flush" takes 10 per cent of it, "four of a kind" pays $500, a "full house" $100 and a "flush" $50.
Three of those five rungs are therefore fixed, one is a share and only the top is the pot. The ladder also varies by jurisdiction rather than by game (the published tables from Macao and from Adelaide both differ from the American one), which means that two tables carrying the same name and the same counter are not the same bet at all.
Then there is what the side bet costs, which is the largest single figure we have published anywhere. The average "house edge" (the proportion of the money staked that the house retains) on this side bet is 26.46 per cent, against a main game priced in low single figures; between 65 and 71 per cent of each side bet goes into the pot (71 per cent at one Canadian casino, 65 at one in Connecticut) and the remainder is kept.
The "seed" for a royal flush is $10,000 (the value the pot restarts at after a win), and the "break-even" counter (the value above which the bet returns more than it costs) depends entirely on which paytable the table in front of you is using. Across the published tables it runs from $29,491.24 to $425,380 (a factor of fourteen on an identical one-unit wager)!
One documented table in Canberra makes the point even more sharply, because its break-even sits at $149,389.47 with a "deadman's hand" bonus attached, and then rises to $238,716.85 where the game minimum is five units and to $328,044.23 where it is ten. The same counter is therefore favourable at one table and hopeless at the next, and no general rule of the kind "above a million it is worth it" survives contact with that spread.
Seven progressives away from the reels, and one of them still alive
The Games Global catalogue is the only one in which we could document the whole family, and it holds seven games with a "progressive" that are not slots. The intervals for all seven, beside the slots of the same generation, are tabulated on the first generation. Six of them have not paid their jackpot for between three and eleven years, and one is still being played every day, which is a ratio worth sitting with for a moment.
The survivor is Roulette Mega Moolah (Switch Studios), a roulette table built on the Mega Moolah network, which shares the seeds and the wheel of the slots beside it and returns 93.61 per cent on a single number. It is alive for the same reason the others are not: the pot behind it is fed by twenty-nine other games, so it does not depend on anybody choosing the roulette table.
The rest are a museum, and we would rather describe them that way than list them as available. Roulette Royale last paid eleven years and eighteen weeks ago, having once given somebody $440,353; Triple Sevens Blackjack has gone six years and thirty weeks (against a largest prize of $145,583); Cyberstud Poker four years and eighteen weeks against $376,591, and Poker Ride four years and thirty-six weeks against $335,653.
Two of the seven are "video poker" rather than table games (Jackpot Deuces and SupaJax), and they are on our video poker and bingo page instead, since the reason they stopped is the same as the reason this list stopped. A progressive attached to one table at one supplier has no way of growing except from the people who sit at that table, and they left.
Why the sums can be done here and cannot be done on a slot
This is the part worth carrying away from the page, and it is a difference of information rather than of mathematics. For a card game the paytable is fully known, the deck is fully known (fifty-two cards, and no supplier discretion over them), and the probability of each hand can be calculated by anybody with the patience, which is why the reference works we read publish break-even counters for video poker, for blackjack and for Caribbean Stud.
For a slot none of that is available to us. The payback of the reels is not published, the probability of the jackpot is not published by any major supplier, and the one number everybody quotes is the counter, which is precisely the number that says nothing on its own!
So this is the one jackpot in a casino where a player can establish, before the chips go down, whether the wager is worth making at all. That is a real advantage, and it comes attached to a house edge of 26.46 per cent on the wager that gives it to him, which is the kind of trade this trade specialises in.
The honest summary is that the side bet is a bad bet made occasionally reasonable by a large counter, and that the counter has to be very large indeed. Everything beneath the top rung is a fixed prize with a 26 per cent edge against it, and you would be paying that edge on every hand while waiting.
What to look at before you put a chip on the jackpot circle
Four things, and all four of them are printed somewhere at the table before you put a chip in the "jackpot circle". The paytable of the side bet comes first, because the figures for four of a kind, a full house and a flush are the part you will actually be paid, and we have seen them differ between jurisdictions by more than most players would imagine.
The share of the counter for a straight flush is second, since ten per cent of a large pot is where most of the real money in this bet has historically been paid. The "table minimum" is third, for the reason the Canberra figures show ($149,389.47 at one unit against $328,044.23 at ten), and the counter itself is fourth and the least important of them.
A last note on what a table jackpot is not. It is not a "must-drop" guarantee of the kind the slot networks have introduced, there is no ceiling at which it has to fall, and nobody we read publishes an "average interval" for one; the counter can sit where it is for a decade, and on one of these games that is exactly what it has done.
- The other half
1,000x
Fixed jackpots
A named prize paid from the game's own maths, which takes nothing from your RTP. The highest multiple anyone has verified is a thousand times the stake.
Read more - The mechanism
£4.50
The minimum stake
On the modern networks any stake qualifies. On the games of the nineties a stake below the threshold pays into a prize it cannot win.
Read more
Questions we are asked about table jackpots
Questions
How does a progressive jackpot work on a table game?
Through a side bet placed beside the hand, usually of one unit, which is settled on its own paytable. The top rung takes the pot, the rung below it takes a stated share, and everything under that is a fixed cash figure that does not grow at all.
What does the Caribbean Stud jackpot side bet cost?
The average house edge on it is 26.46 per cent, which is far worse than the main game, and between 65 and 71 per cent of each side bet goes into the pot while the rest is kept. That is the price of the only jackpot in a casino whose break-even point can be calculated.
When is the Caribbean Stud jackpot worth playing?
It depends on the paytable at that particular table, and the published break-even counters run from $29,491.24 to $425,380. One documented table needs $149,389.47, rising to $328,044.23 where the game minimum is ten units, so no general rule about a counter size survives.
Are there still progressive roulette and blackjack games?
Barely. Of the seven non-slot progressives we could document in one supplier's catalogue, six have gone between three and eleven years without paying, and the only one still alive is a roulette table sitting on a slot network with twenty-nine other games feeding it.
Is a table jackpot a must-drop?
No. None of them carries a ceiling at which it has to fall, none of the sources we read publishes an average interval, and one of these counters has stood unclaimed for more than eleven years.
