Winning Big is Harder Than You Think
Winning big is a dream for many of us – and why shouldn’t it be? After all, a big pile of cash falling into our lap is something many of us desire. Of course, the likelihood of this happening is pretty slim. Games of chance are not charities, after all – they are careful about the odds to always be in their favour. How much, you might ask? Well, let’s take a look at this below.
Scratch cards
Scratch cards are perhaps the most widespread games of chance – so much so that many don’t even consider them a form of gambling. Winning them is the likeliest of them all: according to statistics, one in five will pay out something. This doesn’t necessarily mean that one out of every give scratch cards you buy is a guaranteed winner – it just means that your chances of winning something are pretty good.
As you might expect, though, the bigger the win, the worse the odds of winning it.
Progressive slots
Slot machines are perhaps the most popular games ever invented. There are thousands of them in real life, and thousands more online. There are hundreds of them available at the JackpotCity online casino alone, covering every theme from shoes to supercars. The ones that stand out of the crowd at JackpotCity and beyond are, in turn, those with progressive jackpots attached.
While hitting a progressive jackpot is not easy – you need to be very lucky to win big – it happens pretty often. JackpotCity has paid out a massive CA$16 million jackpot to a lucky Canadian player this spring, and the win was followed by several others later in the year.
Statistically speaking, every spin at a slot machine has a 50% chance of paying out something but, like all other games of chance, these are also built to make money for the operator (the usual “return to player” for a slot machine is around 95%, meaning that in the long run, you can expect to lose about 5% of all the money you wager). The odds of winning a progressive jackpot are much slimmer, though – about 1 in 50 million.
Lottery jackpots
Almost every country around the world has a national lottery – and they are very popular, considering that all a player has to do is to buy a ticket and cross out a few numbers on it to have a chance to win. The two big lotteries to stand out of the crowd are both North American: Mega Millions and Powerball have both had jackpots worth more than $1 billion at one point, and some big winners that pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars. But when it comes to the odds of winning big, lotteries are far behind all of the above. Let’s take Powerball, for example, where you have to correctly guess five numbers (out of 69) and one more (out of 26) to win the jackpot. As you might expect, the odds of winning this are pretty slim: 1 in around 292 million. The smallest possible payout is offered for correctly guessing the Powerball alone: the odds of this are 1 in 38, and the payout is somewhere around $20. From a distance, lotteries may seem the most generous games of chance, with the biggest wins – but if you take a look at the odds, you’ll see that they are not quite as generous as they appear.
