Managing Editor
Two casino gamblers hit eight-figure paydays yesterday — one playing online at DraftKings and the other in person at Resorts World Las Vegas. Both wins came through progressive jackpot slots, which pool money across a number of games to create the biggest payouts possible in the casino space.
Only draw lotteries like Powerball and Mega Millions produce bigger prizes than progressive slots. Those draws not uncommonly run into the billions of dollars. However, they pool money from lottery players across the entire country. Progressive slots function along similar lines, with the jackpot growing until someone wins. However, each jackpot can only collect money from users of a single casino brand, in a single state. Progressive slots jackpots occasionally creep into the millions, but bigger prizes than that are rare.
That’s what makes it so unexpected to see two go off in a single day, each worth in the tens of millions.
An unnamed DraftKings user in Michigan, playing Light & Wonder’s Huff ‘n’ Even More Puff while opted into its sitewide progressive jackpot system, triggered its $22.4 million payout. Almost simultaneously, a visitor at Resorts World triggered the statewide progressive on IGT’s Megabucks Mega Vault for $11.1 million.
Another Record for DraftKings
The DraftKings payout is a U.S. online casino record, and one that’s unlikely to be beaten by anyone except DraftKings itself. The only other online casino brand with enough traffic to build such a jackpot is BetMGM Casino, but it has a cap on its progressives.
BetMGM’s system also links only certain slots developed by its part-owner, Entain. Conversely, the DraftKings progressive is an optional side bet that’s available in a wide range of games across its casino sites, both in-house and third-party.
DraftKings configures its jackpots differently in each state. Inferentially, Michigan must have the lowest odds of hitting, allowing the jackpots to grow larger, because it has set records three times, always in the Wolverine State. Its jackpots in other states (and the Canadian province of Ontario) go off more regularly, but don’t grow quite as large.
The Resorts World win, while impressive, isn’t record-setting. In fact, the Megabucks series of slots starts its jackpots at $10 million, so Wednesday’s win was about as small as it could have been. The all-time record for live slots comes from another game in the same line, over two decades ago. A player betting $100 per spin at Excalibur Las Vegas in 2003 hit a jackpot of $39.7 million, setting a record that stands to this day.
