Online Gambling – Ins and Outs, Ups and Downs

If you have ever visited a casino, then chances are that you have been tempted to try a couple of coins in one of those flashy slot machines that clamour for attention. Maybe you got lucky, or perhaps you moved on after a few spins of the reels. Of course, these days slot machines have moved from the lobbies of casinos to any computer or smartphone with an internet connection. Because online casinos don’t need to worry about floor size or mechanical engineers to repair their slots, it is possible to find a far greater variety of slot games at an online casino than its land-based cousin. However, many people still retain a suspicion of online casino games, wondering whether those large jackpot sums which are advertised ever actually get paid out. The good news is that, yes they do, and there are a large number of millionaires out there who made their fortunes from spinning the reels of an online slot game.

Take Neil from Scotland, for example. The Aberdeen native was sitting in his kitchen with nothing much to do, when he decided to sign up with the Scandinavian Casumo Casino. He made his first deposit and started playing… and you know what’s going to come next. Tempted by the jackpot on offer at Hall of the Gods game from NetEnt, Neil decided to try a few spins. Shortly afterwards, he hit the jackpot: a Casumo record of £6.3 million (€7.1M), to be precise. After the standard period of staring at the screen in disbelief and calling his wife into the room to make sure he wasn’t dreaming, Neil had his win confirmed. Not only that, but this November 2017 jackpot winner was the 5^th multi-million jackpot win from the Casumo Casino in 2017 alone. Check out the colourful and creative @Casumo Twitter feed to find out who becomes the next big winner from this off-the-wall online casino.

Before we look at some even bigger winners, let’s take a moment to look at how progressive jackpot slot games work. When you play a ‘normal’ online slot game, there are fixed prizes that you can win depending on the combinations of symbols that you can match across the reels. Typical maximum jackpots can range from a few thousand, up to hundreds of thousands of euros. However, a progressive jackpot works a little differently. Every time that a player anywhere in the world plays a progressive slot, a small percentage of his per spin bet is added to the overall jackpot amount. This could be one game in a particular online casino, the same game in different casinos, or a series of games known as ‘linked’ progressive jackpot slots. An example of the latter would be the DC Universe slot games produced by Playtech. With so many people around the world playing popular games like Hall of the Gods at various different casinos, the progressive jackpots can start to accumulate very quickly. You just need to be the player who makes the lucky spin which nabs the lot!

We mentioned above that there have been bigger winners than those outlined in our previous example about Casumo Casino. In fact, to date the world record for an online jackpot pay-out stands at an incredible $21 million. This was the amount won by a young British soldier back in 2015, when he was playing the game Mega Moolah from online providers Microgaming. The sudden life-changing windfall came as quite a shock to winner Jon Heywood, as you may well imagine. However, the winning jackpot was confirmed by the online casino Betway, and the millions were transferred to his account, no doubt to the delight of his bank manager! There have been other enormous jackpot wins from online slot games in recent years, if not quite managing to top that of Mr Heywood. For example, an anonymous Finnish player managed to win a staggering €17,861,800 with a single spin bet of just 25 cents, which has to go down as one of the best transactions in history. That jackpot winner was playing NetEnt’s Mega Fortune game, as was the Norwegian winner who sits in third place on the all-time list with his win of just under €12 million.

Records are made to be broken, of course, and by the time you have read this article perhaps the record books will need to be re-written. After all, it only takes one spin of the reels, and if the right symbols show up then a new name could be added to the list of slot game multi-millionaires.