Page 18 - Southern California Gaming Guide • May 2020

Remember six weeks ago when we could all go to the casino with the only care of winning a jackpot? Those were the days. From January 2020, lucky players at Southern California featured casinos won huge slot jackpots. Some of them were life-changing slot jackpots of half a million and over one million dollars. And they were all
won on progressive slots, some of the most exciting plays in the casino.
Big wins from $185,216 to $1,057,317 were all on wide area progressive slot machines IGT’s Wheel of Fortune® and Aristocrat Technologies’ Buffalo Diamond.
One lucky Club Barona member kicked off the New Year and the new decade with an incredible $1,057,317 win at Barona Resort & Casino on January 2nd. Mike O. hit the gigantic jackpot while playing a five-dollar
IGT Wheel of Fortune Double Diamond wide area progressive slot machine.
Plus, Jason E. was at Valley View Casino & Hotel when he won $185,216 on February 15th playing the Wheel of Fortune Triple Red 7’s wide area progressive jackpot. He had played for less than five minutes when he saw three Wheel of Fortune
symbols line up of the middle of all three reels winning him the top jackpot.
Since the Wheel of Fortune slot was launched in 1996, more than $2.5 billion in jackpots have been won on Wheel of Fortune slot machines. There are over 200 land-based slot variants of the game.
The basic slots include Five Times Pay, Double Diamond, and Red, White and Blue. Wheel of Fortune slot machines have bet denominations of 1¢, 25¢, $1, $5, $25 and $100.
And in February at Agua Caliente Casino Palm Springs, Karyn won a $507,981 progressive jackpot playing Buffalo DiamondTM, one of Aristocrat’s most popular slots in the Buffalo family of games. Buffalo Diamond is a penny slot with a wide area progressive Grand Jackpot starting at $500,000 and offers a unique 4x5x6x5x4 reel set
featuring 2,400 ways to win thrilling free games no matter what you bet.
There are three bonus multiplier possibilities, each with growing spin counts. And there are four bet levels, starting at 75 cents, up to $4. The top $4 bet is linked to the Grand progressive that is not available at the other bet levels. All bet levels have access to bonuses with a multiplier.
When a Diamond symbol appears, it adds a free game to one of the three multipliers. In the Free Games Bonus, three or more coins trigger the Buffalo bonus as in most Buffalo games. The number of free games is based on the bet level
and the accumulated spin count for the multiplier you’ve landed on. If you play
this game, as in all progressive slots, play the maximum bet if you want to
win the progressive jackpot.
But do you actually know what
a progressive slot is and how it works? In general, a progressive slot features a jackpot meter that is constantly incrementing. The jackpot increases every time someone plays. Check out
thefollowinghistoryofprogressiveslots.
It All Started with MegabucksTM
Life-changing jackpots, previously the province of state lotteries, came to casino floors in the form of MegabucksTM. Created by IGT with technology originally devised for the
Nebraska state video lottery system, Megabucks was installed at first in Nevada in 1986 and became the first of many MegaJackpotsTM
wide-area progressives.
Megabucks is a $1.00 reel-spinning and video slot machine on a system of multiple connected slot machines in different casinos linked to a central computer. The idea was that a portion of each player’s bet on each machine, at each casino would accrue and grow into the top jackpot prize. Back in the 1980s, the top prize grew to unprecedented amounts: first millions, then tens of millions.
Megabucks made slot-payoff history when Terry W. from Los Gatos, California hit the first MegaBucks MegaJackpotsTM for almost $5 million in 1987 in Reno, Nevada. In 2000, Megabucks set a record then for slot payouts in January when a Las Vegas woman won $34,955,489 at The Desert Inn Resort.
This very first wide area progressive became the spawning ground for an amazing group of inventive IGT MegaJackpotsTM that include TV game shows, movies, celebrity icons and games including
PAGE 18
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
MAY 2020