Regular slots have a fixed maximum payout – when you land the right combination of high paying symbols and bonus round features.

On the flip side, the massive prizes offered by jackpot slots can often fluctuate or grow continuously until someone wins the whole lot. And as we’ll see, multi-million prizes can sometimes be won from a single spin, which is part of the attraction.

Jackpot slots tend to steal the headlines on a fairly regular basis. For example, back in 2018, one very lucky punter managed to win a grand total of more than €18.9 million by playing Microgamings Mega Moolah from an Android mobile device. In fact, it later turned out that this world record amount was won from a spin of just €0.75. 

Jackpots can build or be formed from player contributions in many different ways. One such way is known as a local jackpot slot.

This isn’t anything to do with where you are based or if other players are in close geographical proximity to you. Instead, local jackpots are built from the players at one specific online casino.

So, if you imagine that all the players playing a certain game at one casino are contributing to the prize pool and that the jackpot will be won by one of those contributing players. In this way, it narrows down the number of potential winners.

This setup has upsides and downsides compared to other types of big jackpot slots. On the plus side, there are far fewer competitors challenging you for the big win compared to other types.

However, because fewer people are contributing towards the overall main prize, the totals are unlikely to rise quite so high as those built on the contributions of a larger pool of players.

As you may have already worked out, a small percentage of the wagers made on most jackpot machine releases are used to build the prize pool, which usually builds up more and more until someone triggers it and wins the lot.

Things then reset and begin again from a pre-defined base level. So, in contrast to the smaller prizes of local slots, networked or pooled jackpots can be significantly larger. In this type, then, the prize total is gradually built up from the players at hundreds (or even thousands) of different online casinos that are each hosting the exact same game.