Online Slots Odds

How Progressive Jackpots Can Influence Your Odds of Winning

Certain jackpots like the progressive jackpot types are among the most attractive of all jackpot types. Everyone who plays slots wants a chance of winning a progressive jackpot because most of the time a progressive jackpot represents potentially large sums of money. What many online slots players simply fail to understand is how progressive jackpots can influence your odds of winning them.

Progressive Jackpots are Always Growing

The main feature of a progressive jackpot is that it is constantly growing. This is really the main attraction of progressive jackpots, it is the very nature of them because the more players that tries to win the progressive jackpot, the more the jackpot is added to. The way that progressive jackpots basically work is that all the players who are playing the same progressive jackpot machine, either slots or video poker, will be linked together and simultaneously adding to the grand total.

The thing about a progressive jackpot is that it is always changing from one second to the next. There is a need to keep up with this constant changing and that is why you will always find a progressive jackpot counter on a progressive jackpot machine so that all players are always aware of what the current progressive jackpot total is. There is a very specific combination of symbols or hands that will win a player the jackpot and once the jackpot is won the counter will automatically reset to zero again.

It is Possible to Get EV+ out of a Progressive Jackpot Machine

If you really know what you are doing in progressive jackpot games it is possible to get the progressive jackpot to work in your favor through something called advantage play. The way that advantage play works is that the players using this system will only play a progressive jackpot when there is a positive expectation or EV+ produced by the progressive jackpot machine.

The most basic definition of EV+ or positive expectation has to do with the house edge, in a positive expectation scenario the house or the casino advantage is reduced so far that the player on the progressive machine has the best chance of winning. In order to work out when this is a player will need to work out what the breakeven point is compared to where the progressive jackpot is at that moment in time.

The Team Play Strategy

It is quite widely known that there are those players who organize themselves into progressive jackpot teams in order to increase their collective chances of winning the progressive jackpot. As one might imagine casinos tend to frown on this practice as it is essentially unfair to the individual players also trying to win the progressive jackpot. Most casinos will not allow this sort of strategy and if anyone is found to be colluding in a team type of strategy they will at the very least be penalized for it.