By now we’ve all played quite a few games where progressives were on the table, and the slot is inclined to give the lower progressives. A player questions this structure:
Why is the Jackpot picking always the Mini, sometimes the Minor. Rarely the larger Jackpots (though a elderly gentleman here won $22,000 Grand on a $.88 bet). This is not normal obviously; yet, it is continuous here in Canada and the US.
Christel G.
It comes down to a slot machine’s design, and the fact that the picking in a jackpot bonus isn’t really picking as the bonus is most of the time predetermined.
The slot maker is going to have the Mini come out a lot more often than the Grand because the Grand is a big number and can’t be awarded that often within the overall payback of the machine. Meanwhile, the Mini is usually some small multiple of your bet by comparison, and so that one can come out more often accordingly.
Slot makers do this in other ways. Think about the Wheel of Fortune wheel. How often do you hit the top prize vs. a smaller prize? Most of us get those smaller prizes the vast majority of the time.
So there’s something else that’s going on here called weighting. Weighting means that things aren’t equal – some outcomes will come out more often than others, by design. Weighting allows the bigger prizes to be possible, because the odds of hitting them are low enough to make it mathematically viable.
If each option had an equal chance of coming out, they’d all be pretty close in size accordingly – you can’t have a $10,000 prize that’s as equal as coming out as a $10 prize, in a bonus that occurs relatively frequently. The $10,000 prize would simply be won too often to work. So either the bonus has to occur much less often to account for this, or the prize distribution has to be weighted in favor of the small prizes.
So that’s what’s happening here – the picking you see is for show, and that pot close is weighted highly in favor of the smaller two prizes. It’s not normal in that you see 12 coins and you’re picking to get three of a kind, until you realize no matter what you pick, it was always going to award the Mini that time.
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As I understand it, for most games, the award is predetermined. However, I think in another question, you stated that there are some games in which it is in fact dependent on the player’s choices, and that the way to tell the difference is whether the game shows the other options/choices after the prize is awarded. Is that still true, or have all of them gone to pre-determined status now?
Hey Tim – yes, the lack of a reveal is still a confirmation that it’s predetermined. And while most jackpot picks are predetermined, a few are not, so while it’s generally the case they’re predetermined, it’s not an absolute guarantee. We’ve tweaked the language of the article accordingly since it was written a bit too definitive there, and we appreciate the question!