Progressive jackpots on slot machines grow with play. Predominantly they grow based on how much is wagered on a machine. What casinos can do with that incremented and collected money has its limits, and today’s question drills into that:
Can a casino reset the mega to the minimum without it being “hit”? I’ve been in a casino where it seems all the Megas are at their minimum, or just about it, and it seems too unlikely that they’ve all just been hit.
Roxan D.
Generally speaking, casinos can’t just unilaterally reset progressives and keep the money. They do have some latitude, but all in the form of the money needing to be awarded to players, since players funded the money.
Smaller-scale scenarios happen when slot games are updated or replaced. In some jurisdictions, stickers are placed on slot machines that are scheduled to be decommissioned. The built up progressive prizes are shifted to other machines, ensuring that a player will get a chance to win them at some point. So a new game may launch with a fresh progressive, while that money is added to another one somewhere on the floor.
In more extreme situations like a casino closing, there are a few options. Casinos could shift the prizes to another casino, in an example of a casino owning multiple properties within the same jurisdiction. This was the case when the Tropicana closed in Nevada, because Bally’s had other casinos within the state they could award the prizes.
Another option is to structure some sort of giveaway to players, since that ensures that the prizes are ultimately awarded.
We saw an example of this when the Mirage casino in Las Vegas closed. The casino ran a massive giveaway over the course of its final days of operation, awarding the built up prizes from the various slots they were decommissioning. (They did a similar promotion for the table games progressives.)
A casino also took this approach with a particularly large prize that had accumulated on a slot machine that they could no longer offer due to the license coming to a close.
Keep in mind if a casino has just recently gone on a big replacement cycle, those prizes may all be pretty fresh. (In the most extreme situations, this would be the case when a brand new casino opens up, like we’ve witnessed with Brian at grand openings in the past.)
So it may not be they were just hit; it could be those machines were just installed, and their predecessor prizes were shifted elsewhere, or awarded through some other mechanism.
Have a question? Submit yours here!
