When power is applied, a brief self-test of vital functions of the MPU board will-occur. During this self-test coins are locked out. After completion of this self-test, the slot machine will return to some point in its normal operation. This point is determined by what the machine was doing.;hen power was turned off. Sep 01, 2009 This was a nice Power Up penny slot machine bonus win at The Sands Casino at Bethlehem on 8-24-09.
If you’re looking to win a jackpot that could change your life, then progressive slots are the game to play. Let’s face it—you’ll never win several hundred thousand playing blackjack or roulette. The payouts just aren’t high enough.
The purpose of this page is to provide an explanation of what progressive slots are, how they work, and why you might be interested in playing them. We’ve also included descriptions of some of the more popular progressive jackpots available both online and in traditional brick-and-mortar casinos.
What Is a Progressive Slot, and How Does It Work?
On most slot machines, the jackpot is a fixed amount, but on a progressive game, the jackpot rises as players put coins in the machine and spin the wheels. A tiny percentage of each coin played is used to “feed” the jackpot. There are three types of progressive slot machine games.
Standalone Progressives
A standalone progressive slot machine has a jackpot ticker on the game, but only bets placed on that specific machine feed the jackpot. This was, at one time, the only kind of progressive slot machine game available, but most progressives feature multiple machines that are linked together. Still, so many standalone machines were manufactured that these games are still easily found in casinos throughout the world. Usually the jackpot on the games will be under $10,000.
Local Progressives
Local progressives were the next step in the evolution of this type of game, and they’re still commonly found. These games feature jackpots within a specific casino that are linked. This network can include as few as a dozen or so machines, or it can include a hundred machines—it just depends on the casino. Usually the jackpots available on these games are under $1,000,000, and often they’re under $100,000.
Wide Area Network Progressives
These are some of the most popular casino games on the market today. A wide area network jackpot links slot machines from multiple casinos in the same state. This allows the jackpot to accumulate into astronomical sums of money, often over $1 million and sometimes even over $10 million. The most well-known brand of wide area network progressives are the Megabucks games from IGT, which is the most successful slot machine design company in the world.
How Do You Win a Progressive Jackpot?
No strategy or system can increase your chances of winning a progressive jackpot on a slot machine game. The odds of winning are similar to the odds of winning the lottery, although you get many more chances of winning per hour with a slot machine game than you would get playing a lottery game.
An important thing to keep in mind about progressive jackpots is that they don’t become “due”. The chances of winning are astronomically small no matter how large the jackpot has gotten. It’s possible for a jackpot to grow large enough that a bet on a particular slots game will be a positive expectation bet, but it’s not a practical opportunity to win. A 1 in a million shot is still a 1 in a million shot, even if the jackpot is up to $2 million.
Online Progressive Jackpots
With the rise of online casinos, progressive jackpots on the Internet have become just as popular as the games in actual land-based casinos. Microgaming is one Internet casino provider which has established its fame and reputation based largely on its large assortment of fun, colorful, and relatively loose progressive jackpot games.
Online progressives work just like their land-based cousins. Every wager you make on your computer feeds a tiny amount into the progressive jackpot for that game. Since lots of players are now gambling from the comfort of their homes, these jackpots can become just as large and life-changing as the progressives in Vegas or Atlantic City.
Most Popular Progressive Games
Megabucks is one of the most popular progressive networks available. The probability of winning this jackpot has been estimated at 1 in 50 million. The amounts won on this machine vary from $10 million into the hundreds of millions. Like many lottery games, Megabucks is paid out as an annuity over 25 years.
Wheel of Fortune is a popular brand of slot machine, and it’s available in multiple denominations. One of the most common versions is the quarter version, which has a starting jackpot of $200,000. The jackpot on this game has gotten close to $2 million in the past, but it’s usually won when it’s still under $1 million.
The dollar version of Wheel of Fortune progressives starts with a $1 million jackpot. It’s not unusual for the game to reach $5 million or more, and it’s almost reach $10 million on occasion. Like Megabucks, this jackpot is paid out as an annuity over time.
Elvis isn’t just the king of rock and roll. He’s also a symbol of classic Vegas, so it’s entirely appropriate that he has a progressive slot machine network named after him. The game starts with a $100,000 jackpot, and it costs 25 cents per spin. Keep in mind that to be eligible for the jackpot, you have to make the max bet, which is 3 coins, or 75 cents. We don’t recommend playing progressive slots without making the max bet, because you usually won’t be eligible for the top prize unless you do.
Mega Moolah is an online-only progressive jackpot available at Internet casinos powered by Microgaming software. Multiple games feature the brand name, and the jackpots and betting limits vary. This progressive network features some of the largest jackpots online, often reaching $1 million or more.
Powerball takes the multiple progressive to the next level
by Frank Legato
We can all remember when shooting for a progressive jackpot on a slot machine was a fairly boring proposition. A progressive meant you played for the chance at a big, often life-changing jackpot—and nothing else. Outside of the potential big payoff, what you had was a tight slot that drained your money in a monotonous parade of losing spins.
Not now. These days, a different kind of parade is causing the latest buzz on the slot floor. It is a parade of multiple-progressive slot machines from several manufacturers. These games typically offer a shot at not one, but several different levels of progressive jackpot, and they all hit much more frequently than the older style of big-money slot.
Add in a frequent bonus round—often tied to the progressives—and what you have is an entertaining game that happens also to be a progressive slot.
Play Free Casino Slots Progressive Slots Machine
Add in an ingenious multiple progressive set-up and a sure-fire winning brand, and you have the newest blockbuster from WMS Gaming: Powerball.
Powerball, as anyone not living in a cave knows by now, is the multi-state super-jackpot lottery which most recently awarded the largest lottery prize in history ($365 million to a group of working stiffs from a Midwest meat-packing plant). Powerball—a word you know and love, a word you hear all the time in the news, a word that inspires dreams of quitting that dull job and moving to Easy Street to bathe in riches.
A few years ago, every slot manufacturer in the business was after the rights to the Powerball brand, owned by the Multi-State Lottery organization. “Everyone was bidding on this brand,” recalls Larry Pacey, senior vice president of product development at WMS. “It is a really exciting brand. Even in markets that don’t have the Powerball multi-state lottery game, people know about it. It is a publicly talked-about, newsworthy item.”
When WMS won the rights to the Powerball brand, it fell on Pacey and Phil Gelber, vice president of game development, to create a progressive slot game that would live up to the potential of the brand. “Early on, we recognized through our research process that Powerball is a powerful brand,” says Gelber. “It is constantly in the public eye. When we acquired the brand, we wanted to duplicate the life-changing event, but we also wanted to duplicate the experience of smaller prizes in the lottery, like the scratch-ticket events. You’re playing for the million-dollar jackpot, but along the way you have these other jackpots, simulating the smaller jackpots in the lottery.”
The Powerball Game
The feat of duplicating the most famous lottery in the world within the confines of a video slot would be made possible for WMS game designers through the capabilities of the manufacturer’s “CPU-NXT” video gaming platform, a high-powered computer operating system that provides a vast palette for the creation of elaborate game features. The games in this new platform are featured in the “Bluebird” series, featuring an ergonomically designed, sleek and comfortable cabinet.
In this case, the center of what makes Powerball special is not the cabinet style, but the bonus feature—what is called the “matrix.” It is a matrix of nine local-area progressive jackpots, displayed in a three-by-three grid. The local-area progressives range from reset levels of $5 all the way up to $1,000. Above the grid in the display—in the top box of both video and reel-spinning versions of the game¬—is a multi-site progressive jackpot resetting at $1 million in Nevada, and at half a million in Native American jurisdictions. (A non-progressive version of the game sets this top prize at $10,000.)
When the player triggers the bonus round in either the video or reel-spinning versions of Powerball, the resulting progression of events on the top-box bonus panel leads to the awarding of an amount from $5 up to all nine of the progressive jackpots displayed on the board.
Launched in denominations of two cents to a dollar, Powerball features four base games, and the Bluebird LCD monitor in the top box displaying nine progressive jackpots. On every bonus, players will have the opportunity to win one, two, three, six or even all nine progressive jackpots.
The Powerball progressive feature displays nine available progressive prizes, up to the hundreds and thousands of dollars, with the million-dollar prize at the top. All nine progressive meters will increment constantly with coin-in across the network. The prizes are marked as red, white and blue across the top and “Mega,” “Super” and “Grand” on the side. When the Powerball bonus is initiated, a reel-spinning or video sequence begins to award one prize, two prizes, all three prizes in a row or column, or ultimately, all nine prizes.
“If you think the idea of multi-level progressives is exciting, this is the next generation,” says Pacey. “With the ability to win multiple progressives simultaneously, and have that life-changing jackpot on top, Powerball just becomes a fun lottery game. It’s more about chasing these progressives than the games themselves.”
Video and Reels
Powerball is being launched in four versions—two video, two and reel-spinning versions. The five-reel video versions, called “Powerball—It’s America’s Game” and “Powerball—Millionaire,” include both game-specific bonus features and the common Powerball bonus game. The reel-spinning Powerball entries, called “It’s America’s Game” and “Double Powerball,” are each four-reel slots—three primary reels plus the fourth reel for the bonus.
On the video side, the primary slots “It’s America’s Game” and “Powerball—Millionaire” each feature two game-specific bonus events. In “It’s America’s Game,” five “Power” bonus ball symbols on an active payline trigger the “Power Bonus Sequence.” The player chooses from several bonus balls displayed on the screen to reveal a bonus award.
In the main “Scratch Ticket Bonus,” the player chooses spots on a video lottery ticket to reveal bonus credits and multiplier amounts in a multi-leveled bonus game.
In the “Powerball—Millionaire” game, there is a scratch-ticket game called “Millionaire Dream” and a pick-a-tile, symbol-matching game called “3 Fast Match” in which players select from lottery balls to match bonus amounts and multipliers.
On either video game, three bonus symbols on a payline activates the “Powerball Matrix Bonus.” A field of blue lottery balls appears, alongside a video “hostess” by a game board displaying the grid of bonus prizes. The player selects balls to reveal credits toward a jackpot in the red, white, or blue aisles; or in the “Mega,” “Super” and “Grand” rows of prizes.
Special symbols in the grid reveal prizes of “All White” rows of prizes, or “All Grand,” “All Mega,” etc., levels of prizes, which give the player a combination of three of the progressive jackpots displayed on the board. There also are three “Award All” spots on the board, which award all nine progressive jackpots on the board in one lump of credits.
The reel-spinning games “It’s America’s Game” and “Double Powerball” each feature classic three-reel primary games along with a fourth bonus reel. A bonus symbol on the third reel activates the fourth reel, with symbols corresponding to the jackpots displayed on the three-by-three Powerball grid. As with the video version, symbols can reveal individual bonus awards, combinations of rows or colors of awards, or all nine progressive awards.
The top million-dollar progressive is hit by lining up Powerball bonus features on the indicated pay lines.
The Hook
The jackpot opportunities on this game are plenty, and this is communicated in simple and exciting terms by the vision of 10 jackpots—the nine on the game-show board and the big-money top prize—all incrementing simultaneously with each wager on the network.
“As coins are wagered and the jackpots individually increment, it is the most exciting thing you’ve ever seen,” says Pacey. “If you think the idea of multi-level progressives is exciting, this is the next generation. The ability to win multiple jackpots, and simultaneously, and to have that life-changing jackpot on top, makes Powerball just a fun lottery game. It’s more about chasing the progressives than the primary games. And to be able to award these jackpots regularly is a different twist to the progressive game.”
According to Gelber, the odds of winning all nine of the local-area jackpots in a bonus spin actually are comparably good for the player. “During the course of a good Friday night in a casino, someone’s going to win all nine of those jackpots,” he says. “It is fairly common to win four jackpots in a bonus round, and there are multiple ways of hitting more than one jackpot. Winning all nine at once is not as common, but it will definitely happen. Local-area jackpots of $5 to $1,000 are going off all the time. That’s why these games are really popular in casinos today—because you can win on them often.”
On a bank full of players on the new Powerball game, says Pacey, it will be typical to see players winning progressives left and right, in various levels of richness. “What’s great about it is that you have an opportunity at any time to win more than one progressive jackpot,” he says. “You can actually win all nine progressives, which makes this game the first of its kind. You will actually be able to clear the board of progressives in a single bonus round, and the mechanic of how you unlock the progressives makes players feel they have a sense of control on the video version, and gives them a high level of anticipation on the reel-spinning version.”
According to Gelber, Powerball is being launched at the beginning of April in all Native American jurisdictions served by WMS, including California and Connecticut. After that, the game will appear in Nevada, by the end of April or early May. Harrah’s Entertainment has a 60-day exclusive on the introduction of the game in most markets where the company operates, and Harrah’s casinos will be designing various promotions connected to the launch of Powerball.
“This will probably be the largest launch in gaming history,” says Pacey. “It is the next level of excitement on the slot floor, and when the casinos begin to ratchet it up, everybody’s going to move to it.”
POWERBALL
SLOT TYPE:
Fifteen-line, 100-coin video slot or four-reel, two-coin buy-a-pay mechanical slot; second-screen and mechanical top-box bonus events; nine-level local-area progressive and million-dollar, multi-site progressive jackpots; two-cent through dollar denominations.
PAYBACK % RANGE
Video: 88.01%, 88.28%
Reel-spinning: 89.01%, 89.06%
AVERAGE HIT FREQUENCY:
Video: Approximately 50%
Reels: Approximately 20%
TOP JACKPOT
Progressive; resets at $200,000—$1 million
Stand-alone: $10,000
Progressive Slot Machines In Vegas
AVAILABILITY
AZ, CA, CO, CT, IL, IN, IA, KS, LA, MI (tribal), MN, MS (tribal), MO, NM, NV, NY, ND, OR, SD, WA, WI
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