Most roulette players are well aware that online casinos offer an abundance of choices when it comes to roulette variations. While a Las Vegas casino might have a couple of different roulette tables (American, European, French – if you are lucky), a typical online site might have dozens of different styles of the game across both the live and virtual sections of the site.
But of all of those versions of online roulette you can find, one of the most interesting is certainly progressive jackpot roulette. In the simplest terms, that’s a roulette game with a separate jackpot award. A good example would be Age of the Gods Roulette from Playtech, which can be found in both RNG and live dealer formats at select casinos.
We will use Age of the Gods Roulette as an example here, as its popularity and ubiquitousness are handy to illustrate the pros and cons of the game. AOTG Roulette is not typical of jackpot roulette given its unique theme centered around Greek Gods and Monsters, but the mechanics of the game are typical enough that it will help us explain our points.
Online roulette mirrors real-world probability
Now, as you may be aware, most online roulette games are created so that they mimic their real-world counterparts in terms of RTP (Return to Player). That RTP should be the mirror opposite of the house edge in a real casino. So, for instance, European roulette has a house edge of 2.7%, whereas the RTP for licensed European roulette games is usually 97.3%. The point is that, over time, you would expect to get the same returns online as you would if you were to walk into a casino on the New Jersey boardwalk and play.
Nevertheless, the RTP for AOTG Roulette is somewhere in the region of 95.73%. So, on the one hand, we can say that it’s not as ‘generous’ as European roulette, but it still has a ‘better’ RTP than American roulette. And yet, at the time of writing, the top-tier jackpot for AOTG is approaching $CAD 1 million. It’s a hefty sum, but please note that it could be won at any time and reset to the seed amount.
How are these jackpots won? It’s not hugely complicated. The jackpot game is completely separate from the roulette game. In fact, you don’t even need to get a winning result in your roulette round to trigger the top prize. It is awarded completely randomly through the use of a random number generator. The jackpot is funded by taking a small percentage – around 1% – of each player’s bets on the game, and that grows the prize – hence the name “progressive jackpot” – over time. The RNG decides beforehand what figure the jackpot must hit before it is awarded, and it is the player whose bet contribution makes it reach that amount who wins the award. We should also point out that AOTG Roulette has four distinct jackpots.
Game is (mostly) suited to high-stakes players
But here is the kicker: the mechanics of the game mean that the jackpot award, while random, favors placing a higher bet. Why? Well, if you were placing a bet of 50 cents, then you would only be contributing half a penny to the progressive. If you were betting $CAD 5, you would, therefore, be 10 times more likely to win the jackpot; $CAD 50, and it’s 100 times more likely.
So, that perhaps is our main takeaway here. Everyone will have their own unique roulette strategies, but we think that progressive jackpot is a little more suited to high-stakes players than causal ones. Someone betting on low stakes can still hit the jackpot, but the chances are relatively low. Our last bit of advice is that you should always read the rules of the jackpot roulette game before you play. Make sure the RTP and jackpot contributions match up with your strategy, and take if from there.