- If you like lottery games, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy progressive jackpot slots.
- Slot machines give you more control over your experience, unlike what you get with a lotto ticket.
- Progressive casino games are less volatile than most lottery games, giving you better odds of winning.
I love lotteries. There’s something so simple and fun about spending $1 or $2 on a ticket that could change your life forever.
Of course, the chances of that actually happening are about as good as finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In fact, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 292,201,485 to one.
For this reason, I don’t spend too much money on lottery tickets, no matter how cool the jackpot prize would be. What I tend to do instead is play progressive jackpot slots when I’m in the mood for a shot at big money.
If you like lottery games, I think you’ll agree that there are many good reasons why . Here are some of my favorite reasons.
Casinos Where Extremely Wealthy People Play - AskGamblers BlogYou Have Control Over How Much You Spend
One of the best things about playing progressive slot machines at the is that you have complete control over how much you spend.
When you buy a lottery ticket, you’re paying X amount of money for that one ticket. Regardless of how many tickets you buy, your total expenditure is based on the number of tickets multiplied by the cost per ticket.
Let’s do some quick math using Washington State’s Hit Five Lottery as an example. Most hits require you to match five numbers; if you get all five numbers right, you win the jackpot.
Each ticket costs $1, and here are a few examples of how much you’d spend on different numbers of hits.
- 1 hit = $1
- 10 hits = $10
- 100 hits = $100
- 1,000 hits = $1,000
In each case, your total outlay is equal to the number of tickets multiplied by the price of a ticket.
Casinos Near Miami Beach, FL - Off the Beach FunContrast this with playing a progressive slot machine.
You can go into your favorite land-based casino or open up your phone and start playing for just a couple of bucks. Moreover, you get to decide how many paylines you want to enable and how many coins to wager on each payline.
Here are a few examples of how this works using the classic three-reel Vegas-style slot machine Red White & Blue from Betsoft.
Barstool Casino Michigan Promo Code | 200% Deposit Match (Up to 00) - Legit GamblingThis game has just one payline, and you can wager between one and three coins per spin. Here are a few examples of how much you’d spend under different conditions.
- One coin wagered = $0.50 ($0.16/spin X 3 spins)
- Two coins waggered = $1.00 ($0.33/spin X 3 spins)
- Three coins waggered = $1.50 ($0.50/spin X 3 spins)
As you can see, it is possible to get three shots at hitting the progressive jackpot for less money than it takes to buy a single Hit Five lottery ticket. Furthermore, you can maximize your chances of hitting the jackpot by putting in more work.
It wouldn’t make financial sense to Buy 1 Hit Five Ticket, but Red White & Blue players might find value in making:
- 10 hits = $50
- 100 hits = $500
- 1,000 hits = $5,000
Now, just because you can affordably fire off 1,000 spins of Red, White & Blue doesn’t mean you should. Gambling responsibly means setting limits for yourself and sticking to them. It also means choosing games that offer reasonable chances of winning given your bankroll and playing style.
Sites Where You Can Find Casino Coupon Codes – Plus 3 Bonus SourcesThe bottom line is that playing progressive jackpot slots gives you much greater control over your expenditures than buying lottery tickets.
You Get Immediate Results
Another thing I don’t like about lottery games is that you don’t always find out the results right away.
Here in Washington State, Win 4 and Hit 5 both draw once a day. This means that you have to wait until the next day to find out whether your tickets are winners.
Some other lottery games have more frequent drawings. For example, Daily Grand is drawn every night, and Mega Millions and Powerball draw twice a week. However, even with these games, you’re still looking at a significant wait between your purchase and finding out the results.
By contrast, you get immediate results when playing progressive casino games.
No trip to the store is necessary – you can log into your favorite online casino or walk into your local brick-and-mortar venue and start playing right away. Best of all, you find out almost instantly whether you’ve won big.
There’s nothing quite like pulling the handle on a hot drop jackpot slot machine and seeing several jackpot symbols line up on the payline. Suddenly, you’re holding a winning ticket worth a life-changing amount of cash.
Best Real Money Slots Apps to Win Big 2023Sure, your heart may race a bit if you win the lottery, but it doesn’t pack quite the same punch since you often have to take your victory on faith – your numbers didn’t match up last night, but you won’t find out for another day or so whether you’re actually a winner.
Here’s one area where the lottery does have progressive slots beat – jackpot chases can be expensive, and winning isn’t guaranteed just because you dropped a hundred bucks or more into a slot machine. On the other hand, you can make things more affordable by , which allows you to spread your bets around rather than putting all your eggs in one slot machine.
With lottery tickets, you know exactly how much you’re going to spend – a dollar or two here and there. However, by buying nothing but winning tickets, you’d miss out on the thrill of setting smaller bets and gradually ratcheting up your wager in search of that elusive jackpot.
Besides, with progressive jackpot slots, you can sometimes win life-changing prizes for just a few bucks. For example, a woman who worked as a bartender at a Kalispell, Montana, casino won a nearly $1.5 million jackpot after betting just 25 cents.
online casino roulette real moneyCan you win the lottery without even buying a ticket?
Progressive Casino Games Are Less Volatile
One feature of progressive jackpot slots that some people find confusing is their variance or volatility.
de los mejores casinos en línea según expertos 👍️🏆Slot machine variance describes how frequently the machine pays out and how generous those payouts are when they occur. Low-variance slots (also known as tight slots or grind machines) pay regularly but only dispense small sum of cash with each win.
High-variance slots (also known as loose slots), on the other hand, don’t pay very often, but when they do, you can expect a nice pile of chips to shoot out of the hopper.
Progressive jackpot slots are typically high variance. After all, the entire point of playing a progressive slot machine is having the opportunity to win a huge jackpot. Naturally, such a large reward requires taking a big risk.
You can see this variance at work by tracking the history of a progressive slot machine.
Take the above-mentioned Red, White & Blue slot from BetSoft. I visited a half-dozen different online casinos and recorded the jackpot amount at each location. The lowest jackpot was $357,921.52, and the highest was $1,120,383.42 – a difference of almost $800,000.
Obviously, if you showed up to play Red, White & Blue right before one of the jackprosps, you’d have a long wait before you had a shot at hitting the big prize.
Compare this to a lottery game like Washington’s Hit 5. While the jackpots for these games aren’t usually as large as some progressive slot machine rewards, they are much more predictable.
Here’s a screenshot I took of the Washington Lottery’s website at midday on December 16, 2021.
As you can see, at the time I captured this image, the Hit 5 jackpot had just reset, and its current value was $20,000.
Given that Hit 5 tickets are only $1 and the game is drawn daily, you could reasonably purchase all of the winning tickets and claim the jackpot the very next day for no more than $1,020. Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it could cost you to have a shot at taking down a progressive slot machine jackpot.
Other Washington State lottery games, like Mega Millions and Powerball, have larger jackpots but longer intervals between draws. Their drawings are held twice a week, so you can’t predict exactly when you’ll hit the jackpot.
Furthermore, these games are played across multiple states, so their jackpots routinely grow to absolutely absurd sizes.
When I checked, the Mega Millions jackpot had just rolled over, and its current value was $37 million. Powerball was up to $147 million. Obviously, these jackpots dwarf anything you’re likely to encounter with a progressive slot machine.
However, it could be weeks or even months before the Mega Millions or Powerball jackpot, and nobody knows exactly how much the jackpot will be when it is awarded.
Ways to Attract More Players to Your Online CasinoIn short, progressive jackpot slots are more volatile than most lottery games. With a slot machine, you usually know pretty much what the jackpot is going to cost you, but you have no idea when you’ll have to pony up.
With lottery games, you know more or less when you’ll have to pay your fixed price, but you have less control over whether you’ll actually have to stump up the cash.
🇰🇷 Korea, South | bet365 Poker - geo-restricted countriesPersonally, I prefer the ability to control my own destiny that progressive slot machines provide. Of course, everybody plays the lottery now and then for the fun of it, just like some folks get together to play poker without expecting to make a profit.
If you’d like to try your luck at a progressive jackpot slot machine, Ignition Casino is an excellent place to start. Not only do they feature a wide range of hot drop jackpot slots, but they also welcome new players with a 300% deposit boost worth up to $3,000.
Are Progressive Jackpot Slots Better Than the Lottery?
At this point, you probably have a good idea of whether progressive jackpot slots or lottery games are right for you.
I enjoy playing both types of games for the simple reason that they’re both a lot of fun.
Sure, the odds of winning the lottery are abysmal, and the variable pay schedule makes it tough to plan ahead. However, lottery tickets are cheap, easy to obtain, and sometimes win you life-changing amounts of cash. Every now and again, I like to buy a few tickets just for the thrill of it.
Deposit Casinos with Free Slot Games to Play Online in 2023On the other hand, progressive jackpot slots also present a significant challenge while still offering the possibility of a major score.
The main advantage of progressive casino games over lottery tickets will always be that you find out immediately whether you’ve won. There’s something exciting about pulling the handle on a hot drop slot machine and knowing for sure whether you’ve hit the jackpot.
If you don’t mind waiting to find out whether you’re a winner, though, there’s nothing wrong with buying the occasional lottery ticket. Here are some of my favorite lottery games you can play online.
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Footnotes:
- Powerball revenue data is taken from .
Zac Crain is a former professional poker player who attended his first World Series of Poker at the age of . He has been working as a writer for almost a decade, specializing in poker, blackjack, and other various topics of interest to gamblers.
