A terminal player has no account you can email and no reason to come back tomorrow rather than to the room across the street. A jackpot is the cheapest answer to that problem: a number on the wall that grows while people play, funded by the floor itself rather than out of your margin.
The jackpot layer in our VLT platform runs six levels, funded by a configurable share of every qualifying bet, accumulating either within a single hall or across an agent’s whole network.
Six levels
Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond. Every level has the same set of parameters, so the difference between them is entirely how you configure them — contribution rate, the size it pays at, and how often it drops.
Six levels exist because one does not work. A single large jackpot is exciting for about a week and then becomes background scenery, because nobody in the room believes it will land while they are sitting there. A ladder gives you frequent small drops at the bottom that people actually witness, and a headline number at the top that gives them a reason to keep sitting.
How the pool fills
A percentage of every qualifying bet goes into the pool. Default contribution rates run from 0.05% to 0.20% per level, and every part of that is configurable.
Qualifying is the word worth noticing. Each level has a minimum stake, and bets below it do not contribute and do not win. That is how you stop a player feeding a machine the smallest possible coin to fish for a jackpot funded by everyone else.
What a contribution rate costs you
The arithmetic is simple enough to do before a meeting. Contribution comes out of turnover, not out of margin, so the question is only how much of the floor’s throughput you are recycling back into visible prizes.
Take a hall turning over 200,000 a month in total stakes. At 0.10% across a level, that level accumulates 200 a month. Run the full ladder at rates summing to 0.70% and you are putting 1,400 a month into prize pools — money that comes back out onto the floor as wins rather than leaving the building.
Those are illustrative figures on a round number, not a projection for your venue. The point is the shape: the cost is proportional and predictable, and you set it yourself per level.
Where the pool lives
Accumulation happens either at the hall or at the agent. That single setting is the difference between two quite different products.
At hall level, every machine in one room feeds one pool. Six terminals can advertise a prize no single cabinet could ever fund, and the winner is somebody in the room — which is the version that actually changes behaviour, because the other players watch it happen.
At agent level, every hall under that agent feeds one pool. This is the wide-area progressive: a small operator with four rooms can put a number on the wall that looks like a casino’s, funded by four rooms’ worth of turnover rather than one.
Because this follows the account structure described on the terminal management system, a network can run both at once — local pools that drop often in each room, and one network-wide prize above them.
When it pays
A level pays when its pool reaches its win value, and that value sits inside a minimum and maximum band you configure. After a win the pool restarts from its starting value rather than from zero, so the number on the wall never sits at nothing — which matters, because a jackpot display showing a small figure is worse advertising than no display at all.
The player has to be there
A jackpot is credited only to a player who is online at the time. Worth understanding before you set your rates: it keeps the prize inside the room where it can be seen being won, and it means a pool cannot be taken by somebody who left an hour ago.
Multi-jackpot
Switched on, a win is divided equally among every player who placed a bet in the previous sixty seconds rather than going to one person.
This is more useful than it first sounds. A single winner produces one happy player and a room of people who watched somebody else get lucky. A split produces a room of people who all just won something, which is a substantially better Friday night for the floor. It suits busy venues and social formats like fish games; it suits a quiet room with three regulars much less.
One win per player per day
An optional restriction stops the same player taking a jackpot more than once in a day. On a small floor with a few heavy regulars this stops one person quietly collecting most of the prize fund the rest of the room is paying for.
What players see
Enabled jackpots appear in the game lobby with their current value. Each level also has an activation percentage: once the pool reaches that share of its target, the display starts highlighting it.
That highlight is the part worth tuning rather than leaving at its default. It is the closest thing a terminal floor has to a last-orders bell — the signal that tells the room something is about to happen and it is worth staying for.
Configuration and control
| Parameter | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Contribution percentage | The share of each qualifying bet added to the pool |
| Bet | The minimum stake that qualifies a spin for this level |
| Starting value | Where the pool restarts after a win |
| Minimum and maximum | The band the win value sits within |
| Win | The pool value at which the level pays |
| Total percent | Additional percentage awarded after a win |
| Activation percentage | When the level starts highlighting in the lobby |
| Multi-jackpot | Whether a win splits across recent players or goes to one |
| Daily limit | Whether one player can win more than once a day |
Who may see and change these is set through access rights, so jackpot configuration can sit with the network owner rather than with every agent or hall manager underneath them. On a distributed network that separation matters: prize funding is a commercial decision, not a floor-level one.
Questions operators ask
How many jackpot levels are there?
Six: Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond. They share the same parameter set, so you decide what separates them — typically frequent small drops at the lower levels and a slow headline prize at the top.
Who pays for the jackpot?
The floor does. A configurable percentage of each qualifying bet accumulates into the pool — defaults run from 0.05% to 0.20% per level. It comes out of turnover rather than out of your margin, and it returns to players as prizes instead of leaving the venue.
Can a jackpot link several venues?
Yes. Pools accumulate either at hall level, where every machine in one room feeds one prize, or at agent level, where every hall under that agent feeds a single pool. The second is how a small operator advertises a number that looks like a casino’s.
Can more than one player win the same jackpot?
If you enable multi-jackpot, yes — the win is divided equally among everyone who bet in the previous sixty seconds. It works well in busy or social venues, where a room full of small wins beats one winner and thirty spectators.
What stops one regular winning everything?
Two settings. A minimum qualifying stake per level, so the prize is funded by the players eligible for it, and an optional daily limit preventing the same player taking a jackpot more than once in a day.
What happens if the winning player has already left?
A jackpot is credited only to a player who is online when it drops, so it stays in the room and is seen being won. Set your win bands with that in mind — a prize that only ever lands during quiet hours is one nobody witnesses.
Related
VLT software
The platform the jackpot layer belongs to: server, games, back office, terminal.
Terminal management system
Where jackpots are configured, and the hierarchy pools accumulate across.
Games for gaming terminals
The titles a jackpot runs over, and how to build a mix by venue.
Gaming terminal software
The client on the machine, and the hardware it runs on.
Work out what your floor can fund
Bring your turnover and your room count and we will set the ladder against real numbers — what each level would accumulate, and how often it would drop.