The second-largest Megabucks jackpot in history was hit on Easter Sunday at Terrible’s Rail City in Sparks. A 38-year-old Reno woman took the $33,000,563 prize (the record remains the $39.7 million bonanza hit at Excalibur six years ago).
Many of you were confused when the jackpot suddenly jumped from $19 million to $31 million in late March; we received numerous QoD submissions about it. Here’s what happened.
IGT wanted to retire its (video) Penny Megabucks. But a game with a live progressive jackpot can’t be discontinued without the money that it’s accumulated being disbursed in some manner. Often in cases like this, a casino will add the retired jackpot to an ongoing progressive, and this is what IGT got regulator permission to do. Adding the money from the penny game to the dollar progressive resulted in the instant jump to $31 million, and that grew to $33 million before it was hit.
It’s rare that a jackpot is transferred in this way, but when it is, it can create a good situation for players. Anthony Curtis tells a story about such an opportunity back in the early ‘90s. One day he awoke at 5 a.m. and opened the morning newspaper. Inside was a small ad from Tom’s Sunset Casino in Henderson, indicating that the casino had switched its dollar video poker machines at the bar to quarters and transferred the progressive jackpots. Anthony knew that meant that the 8/5 Jacks or Better progressive would be a minimum of $4,000 (the reset value for a dollar machine), resulting in a 104.6% game. He jumped in his car and drove down.
"I got there a few minutes after 6 a.m.," Anthony recalls. "I couldn’t wait to find out how high the progressive had climbed and couldn’t believe what I saw. The bar bank had separate progressives for each suit, so there were four of them. What’s more, they were all high, with the heart royal flush close to $9,000. The average jackpot was about $6,000, putting the return for playing at nearly 110%. Remember, those were the days before the Internet, so I knew it would take time for other players to find out about it. There were 10 seats at the bar —- all empty!"
Anthony called his crew —- Blair Rodman (who years later won a WSOP bracelet and wrote Kill Phil), Ed House (a legendary advantage player who’s referenced in the May LVA) and Ed's wife Sharon (no slouch as a player herself). When they arrived, there were still no other players.
The four had the game to themselves for two hours, when a familiar face showed up. It was another pro, which meant that the word was out. Now it was just a matter of time before it would become a full-fledged video poker slugfest. Indeed, by 11 a.m., every seat at the bar was taken and hopefuls were milling around behind them. Anthony, Blair, Ed, and Sharon played like demons, only to see the jackpots fall, one after the next, to others.
"The worst part," says Anthony, "was that the big one stayed up and kept growing, so we had to keep playing for it. It wasn’t hit till 11 p.m., and it wasn’t by one of us. When the smoke cleared, I’d spent almost 18 hours pounding on one of the best video poker games ever and our group had lost more than $6,000."
Anthony smiles and adds, "A theoretical advantage doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d take a shot like that every day if I could."
