One of the many draws online casinos use to entice players, like their physical casino counterparts, is progressive jackpots. As players make wagers, a small percentage go to the progressive jackpots, which generally build until won.
Online casinos, as with other aspects of their business, can sometimes take different approaches than physical ones. One major area is the use of an extra progressive or group of progressives layered on top of a slot or group of slot machines.
The problem is these often come in the form of an ante bet. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, an ante bet is an additional bet that unlocks an additional payout. These ante bets tend to be flat additional bets on top of the game’s baseline bet.
DraftKings, for instance, offers a few progressive variations that I noticed during my most recent trip to Michigan to check out what’s new in the online casino world. Almost every game offered some sort of option to opt in to a progressive.
One available as of this writing, a single-level progressive, requires 10 cents a spin extra to qualify. Another, a multi-level progressive, requires 25 cents per spin to be eligible. And finally, there’s a must hit by variation that is a single level progressive, but has to be paid by a certain dollar amount, and is also 25 cents per spin to qualify.
The thing about these ante bets is these progressives are of a size that they’re not likely to be won that often. So every player is betting into it, which effectively reduces their actual payback in a session, except for the small number of players who actually win them.
The flat fee per spin tends to be most challenging for the smaller bettors. It may sound small enough to be 10 cents per spin, but if you’re a player who likes to low roll, that could be a 50 percent premium on top of a 20 cent spin, for a progressive they’re unlikely to win. And with one-third of their bets going to that hard to win progressive, it’s likely those players will burn through their bankroll that much faster.
Now look at the same example with the 25 cent ante bets, and you’re talking about a 125% premium to be eligible for a long shot progressive win, and you have to pay it every spin to remain eligible.
A more equitable option would be for it to be a percentage of your wager; at least in that scenario it scales with your bet (and with higher amounts, it should/would increase your chances of winning), where the percentage committed to this side bet is consistently proportional.
If you’re looking for a way to qualify for progressives, especially for lower bet levels, it may be worth pursuing high RTP games that have progressives already built in. In that way you’re not paying for an additional wager to have a long shot – that’s already baked into the overall payback of the slot to begin with.
But since the chances of winning will be proportional to your bet, you won’t be taking a substantial portion of your bet to funding that chance for a progressive.
Of course if you’re already betting high enough, a 10 cent ante bet on a $5 bet is now down to 2% – much more reasonable for a long shot, and not likely to kill your bankroll as fast for a small chance at a big payday.
On the surface, it may seem nice that anyone, no matter how big a bettor, can qualify for these big payouts, but the reality is those with bigger budgets will be able to survive more easily than those with lower ones to keep spinning and have a chance at it, when the ante bet is largely not going to deliver anything in a given session.
