Every slot player worth his or her salt wants to win The Big Jackpot, that lottery style bonanza that alters your life forever. We are, of course, talking about progressive jackpot slot machines. There are hundreds of them out there online in cyberspace advertising big money win opportunities. But how do these work, and how do the casinos manage to front up such big jackpots? Essentially this is how it works: The big progressive jackpots build up in online slots games in which a percentage of the coins that are played into the online slot accumulate into a Jackpot, that builds and builds until someone scoops the big prize. Then the jackpot whittles down again, and starts on its climb up the value chain again.

Mega Moola has a £1,000,000 jackpot

What´s more, different online casinos are linked together across a network of sites that use the same software, meaning that more people are fueling the jackpot, causing it to build into a bigger and bigger pot.

So for example, you might have 3 several casinos that operate their games using Microgaming software. Example of casinos that use this software include 32 Red , Riverbelle and 7 Sultans.

The different casinos form a network for 2 reasons:
1. To be able to offer truly huge jackpots, often that run into the millions
2. To limit their exposure to the big wins. When someone wins the big jackpot, the loss is shared by all of the individual players in the market, which protects any one individual casino from taking a million pound hit.

So should you play progressive slots? Well, suffice to say, that progressive slots are similar in many ways to playing the lottery. The odds of winning the big one are small (you´ll get much better odds playing the table games like blackjack). Don´t make it the mainstay of your play as you are more likely to lose all of your money than win the big jackpot. But on the otherhand, if you fancy a flutter give them a go, and you never know, it could be you who scoops the big prize.

Just remember, the jackpot has got to come from somewhere, and it is funded by lots of different people playing the machines across different casinos in a big network across the Internet. Only one of those people will win the big one!