There is no strategy that will guarantee that you win a progressive jackpot in an online slot, but there are strategies that you can take that will improve your chances of winning. Along similar lines, you can also improve the average size of your payout if you do win.
Because the variance and volatility of these games is so high, you could find situations in progressive slots where you have an advantage against the casino and still come out with a lifetime net loss overall. In spite of that, we’re going to break down the best strategies for these progressive jackpot games to give you the best chances of winning the biggest prizes possible.
See our list of progressive jackpot slots.
Bet Sizing Options
Your bet size is one of the most important things you have control over when it comes to boosting your chances of winning a progressive jackpot. Many games won’t allow you to even have a shot at the progressive unless you bet at a certain level, so it’s obvious you’ll need to adjust your wager if you want a shot at getting the biggest prize.
However, other games will scale your chances of winning to the size of your bet to make it fair for everyone playing. For example, a wager of $1 will have one-fifth of the chance of hitting the progressive than a wager of $5. Also keep in mind that longer sessions play into this as well because a single spin worth $5 will have the same chance of winning as five spins at the $1 level.
What this means is that if you want to maximize your chances of winning the progressive on a single spin, then that would mean making the largest bet size you can since the odds of winning are scaled to the amount you wager. However, in practical terms, it’s really the total amount that you wager that determines your overall chance of winning the progressive in a session. This is a bankroll management issue as well since you don’t necessarily want to play over your means.
Selecting Games to Play
One of the things that’s really interesting about how progressive slots work is that the jackpot can get large enough to make the game have a payout rate of more than 100 percent. With an RTP of 101 percent, for example, for every $100 that a player would wager, he or she would get back $101 on average. The volatility is large enough that it’s very much possible to only play games like this in your lifetime and still come out as an overall net loser, but it’s something to consider.
All else being equal, you would prefer to play progressives that have the largest RTP available. To this end, you can create a simple list or spreadsheet of progressive titles along with their seed values for their jackpots and their normal RTP rates. This can help you to judge which of the games you should play whenever you start a session. The relative value of the jackpot compared to the seed value is the main thing you should look at with this instead of just thinking about the total size of the jackpot overall.
To give a simple example, suppose that Game A has a $100,000 seed value with a $500,000 current jackpot value. If Game B has a $1 million seed value and a $1.2 million current jackpot value, it’s clear that the total jackpot for Game B is higher than that of Game A. However, Game A is still a better deal since the jackpot is five times the size of its seed value, but Game B’s jackpot hasn’t even doubled in size.
Forming a Complete Strategy
As we mentioned earlier, there is no such thing as a progressive jackpot strategy that will guarantee that you come out on top with a win. However, you can form a complete strategy based on how you pick the games you play and how you bet on those games to maximize your practical chances of winning as a whole.
You do this by balancing good bankroll management with picking out games that have the best relative jackpots to get the best RTPs available from whatever casino you’re playing with. A quick look over all of the top progressives will give you one or two that are the best picks for the moment based on their seed values. From there, you can pick out bet sizes that make sense depending on how the chances of winning the jackpot are determined.
Where to play progressive jackpot slots?
