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What are the odds of hitting Megabucks?
In 1999, one of our slot experts, John Robison (author of The Slot Expert's Guide to Playing the Slots), saw a Megabucks PAR sheet, which delineates the payout percentages of slot machines to ensure that they live up to their end of the payback-percentage bargain. It showed that each reel on a three-reel Megabucks machine has 368 virtual stops, which put the chances of hitting the Megabucks jackpot at 1 out of 49,836,032.
Using that probability, Michael "Wizard of Odds" Shackleford estimated that the average point at which Megabucks will hit is about $15.2 million.
In 2006, Megabucks manufacturer IGT ran ads saying that that jackpot was "statistically overdue" when the jackpot went over $14 million. This was close enough to Shackleford's estimate for it to be considered mostly accurate.
The last time the Megabucks reset amount was raised was in 2005 (from $7 million to $10 million). Since the "overdue" ads ran a year later and the reset amount hasn't changed since then, it looks to us like the chances of hitting Megabucks are still 1 in just under 50 million.