The International Game Technology company congratulated a player who won a whopping $2,142,106.85 progressive jackpot on a Wheel of Fortune slot machine earlier this week. The company took to Twitter announcing the news. The player, whose identity is unknown, played at Silver Resort Casino in Reno, Nevada, where he received one of the biggest payouts for the Wheel of Fortune slot machine in casinos across Nevada. He became the sixth person to win seven figures while playing the slot this year, just three months after the fifth player of the year who won seven figures at the Venetian Hotel & Casino in May.
The Odds of This Happening
Winning this amount of money from the Wheel of Fortune slot machine, or any slot machine is a rare occurrence. This year, from January up until now, only six players (including the latest winner) have managed to win seven figure amounts from this particular machine. This is six players in eight months, out of thousands of Wheel of Fortune slot machine players across Nevada every day. There is no strategy to winning slot machines due to the fact that the game is based on chance. Games of chance are unlike other casino games like poker where skill application and experience play a role. Also, in poker like games you gamble against your opponents, while playing slots, you gamble against the house. Seasoned players will know that the house always wins in the long run.
How Wheel of Fortune Slot Machines Work Against the Player & Why Winning is a Big Deal
To simplify things, imagine a slot game that only has one payout (the jackpot) which gets paid out to those who manage to align five matching symbols on a reel. Matching the symbols is a winning requirement when playing actual slot games as well. In this hypothetical slot machine, to win the ultimate jackpot (which was over $2 million in this case), you have to match five symbols on each line for many tries to win life changing money in the long run.
The reels of the Wheel of Fortune slot machine are controlled by a random number generator. The reels also feature many different symbols, and you need to match five of them to win. While using a random number generator, over time, each of the five symbols will appear on the reels an equal number of times. This means that the odds of a cherry appearing on one of the reels (assuming that this is a fruit slot machine) is 1:5. The odds of a cherry hitting one of the other reels is also 1:5. Therefore, the odds of all five cherries appearing on all five reels at the same time is 1:5 multiplied by itself five times. This figure is equal to 0.032%. But, remember there are other types of fruit that can appear on the reels, cherries are just one of them. This means that your chances of matching symbols are better than this because there’s the possibility of apples aligning and bananas aligning etc. So, in this instance, your chances of hitting any set of five fruits are actually 0.032% multiplied by five (assuming there’s five different types of fruit). If our math skills serve us right, this equals to 0.16%. This means that for every 625 spins on a Wheel of Fortune slot machine, you’ll hit the jackpot. Its unlikely that one single player will play that many times in one seating, so you must be incredibly lucky to win major money in one seating like the player at Silver Resort Casino in Reno, and the three others before him.
Other Wheel of Fortune Slot Machine Winners
As mentioned previously, the player at Silver Legacy Resort and Casino in Reno was the latest player to win seven figures from Wheel of Fortune’s progressive jackpot. Some of the other wins include:
May 11, 2019: Venetian Hotel & Casino- $ 1,883,896.27
March 3, 2019: The Venetian Hotel & Casino- $ 1,311,818.58
February 6, 2019: Caesars Palace Las Vegas- $ 1,147,452.63
January 26, 2019: Harvey’s Lake Tahoe- $ 1,099,338.78
January 19, 2019: Boomtown Casino & Hotel, Reno- $ 2,161,666.76
