Since every spin is random, the most important way to increase your odds of hitting the jackpot are to pick a machine with the best chances of doing so. Since the casinos don't tell you what the odds are that makes your job difficult. In general, you know that the bigger the jackpot, the worse the odds. The odds are about 262,144 to 1 on a typical machine with a $10,000 jackpot. On Megabucks, with its multi-million dollar jackpots, the odds are closer to 1 in 50 million. I've read the data about the odds of hitting the top jackpot on the progressive slot machines at Casino.net, along with the jackpot amount for the $0.25 and $1.00 machines on Dec. 17, 2003. Based on the figures, Jack in the Box is clearly the best bet. The chances of hitting the jackpot are better than with Aladdin's Lamp and Haunted House, and the jackpot is larger than Gold Pirates.

It's significant that Casino.net makes their jackpot odds public. I've never seen another land or Internet casino that's up front with their players like this. Casino.net gets big, big kudos for making these figures public.

It doesn't matter how long it's been since the machine hit its last jackpot. If the odds of hitting a jackpot on one spin are 1 in 250,000, then they're always 1 in 250,000, whether the last jackpot hit last year or five minutes ago. No slot machine is ever "due" to hit. That's the way probability works. The odds of getting heads on a coin flip are always 1 in 2, no matter what you got on previous flips. If you just flipped ten heads in a row, then you're just as likely to get heads yet again as you are to get tails. If you're not convinced about this then see our article about exposing the gambler's fallacy. The point is, past events have no effect on future events. Many people would avoid playing a machine that just hit a jackpot because they think another jackpot is magically less likely, but in fact the odds are the same on every spin, no matter what happened before.