The meters, live
Every progressive bet on the Mississippi Stud, Hold'em and I Luv Suits Play tables raises these — tap the PROG circle on the felt to bet it — and only a full jackpot hit resets one, for everybody. Play money, real arithmetic.
Every hit, and the deck that dealt it
The server deals the progressive. When a table has the bet on, it fetches a sealed deck for the next hand — a random seed that the page and the server shuffle into the same 52 cards — and the server reads the jackpot hand off it the moment it is issued, so a jackpot cannot be claimed that the deck did not deal. Every hit below keeps its seed: Verify deals it again, here, in your browser.
The network so far
When is it worth it?
A progressive bet is two bets in one. The flat rows — quads, full house, flush and below — return 53.06% of the stake on the five-card table, whatever the meter says. The meter rows add the rest: every $10,000 on the meter adds 0.585% to the return of a $5 bet, because a royal takes all of it once in 649,740 hands and a straight flush a tenth of it once in 72,193. So the bet's value is a straight line in the meter, and it crosses zero at the break-even jackpot: $802,653 on the five-card meter, $878,510 on the seven-card one.
The numbers behind the chart
The published version of the five-card table is exactly this one at $1: Wizard of Odds' analysis of
Ultimate Texas Hold'em's common progressive gives fixed wins of 53.06%, 2.924% per $10,000 on the meter and a break-even
jackpot of $160,530.53 — and this page's engine reproduces all three to the cent (test-progressive.mjs).
Five times the stake means five times the break-even, because the flat rows scale with the bet and the jackpot does not.
No progressive is ever due
"It hasn't hit in ages, it's due" is the oldest fallacy at a progressive, and for these meters it is simply false: a royal is one in 649,740 on every deal, and a meter that has climbed for months is exactly as likely to hit on the next hand as one that reset this morning. What a big meter changes is how much the hit pays — never how soon it comes. Each meter here is the standard kind: every bet adds its dollar, a 10% hit takes a tenth, and only a full hit resets it. So the whole decision is the line above: the bet is worth making when the meter is past its break-even, and at no other time.
The price of playing it every hand
The meter tells you whether this hand is better or worse than average. It does not tell you what the bet costs, and the answer to that does not depend on the meter at all. Every contribution on a meter is paid out to somebody eventually, and the house adds the seed back after each reset, so over the bet's whole life it returns the flat rows plus the meter rate plus the seeds: 74.6% on the five-card table, 75.2% on the seven-card one. A 25.4% house edge — against 44.0% if you only ever bet it straight after a reset, which is where most players meet it.
The average jackpot is the other half of that picture. In the long run the five-card meter pays its royal at $368,284 on average — well short of the $802,653 break-even — because a straight flush shaves 10% off it nine times as often as a royal resets it. On a network with real traffic the meter spends nearly all of its life under break-even. On this one, with play-money traffic, a royal is expected once in 649,740 bets, so the meters will mostly just grow.
Three more things that move the number
Envy bonuses
The published five-card table pays an envy bonus — $1,000 when another player at your table hits the royal, $300 on a straight flush — to everyone else who has the bet up. Each other player is worth +0.57% to your return, and a full table of five others lowers the $1 break-even from $160,530.53 to $150,793.68 (Wizard of Odds' figures, reproduced exactly). The seats at these Play tables are the table's cards for the collusion simulation, not players at the progressive, so no envy is paid here.
Never bet a second unit
Linked systems such as MegaLink let you bet one to five units, and multiply the flat rows by the units — but pay the meter rows as a percentage of the meter, not multiplied. The first unit buys the jackpot; every unit after it buys only the flat rows, a −46.9% bet. Whatever the meter, a second unit is the worst wager on the felt. This network takes exactly one.
A quiet network is your own money
Of every $5 you bet, $1.00 goes on the jackpot and stays there until somebody hits it. On a busy network that dollar funds strangers' jackpots, and the EV at the meter is the honest number. On a quiet one it is mostly yours: if you are the only bettor and keep playing until it hits, every contribution comes back to you, and what you really pay is the long-run edge.
Fold, and it still pays
The progressive pays on the cards you are dealt, win, lose or fold — Stud's two cards and the board, a Hold'em hand's hole cards and the flop, your seven in I Luv Suits. Nothing you do in the main game changes what it pays, so it changes nothing about how to play the main game: the two bets are decided by different things, and only the main one has decisions.
How the network works
Which games can share a meter
A linked meter is one pot paid into by several games, so it is fair only between games that reach its jackpot hands equally often — otherwise one game's players pay for the other's royals. A meter paid by a hand can link games exactly when the hand it reads is the same random object in each. Mississippi Stud's two cards and three community cards, and a Hold'em player's two hole cards and the flop, are both five cards from a fresh deck; one pay table prices identically on both, which is why the published tables for the two are the same table and why casinos link them — the Golden Nugget's Mississippi Stud progressive is, in Wizard of Odds' words, "a linked progressive with the same bet in Ultimate Texas Hold 'Em". I Luv Suits deals seven cards, so it has a pay table of its own — and any game dealing a player seven random cards (a Hold'em hand at the river) could join it.
Five-Card Link · $5 · Mississippi Stud, Ultimate and Heads Up Hold'em
Seven-Card Straight Flush · $5 · I Luv Suits
Pays are "for 1": the $5 is never returned, so a row paying 9 hands back $45 and wins $40. Only the best row a hand reaches pays. The odds column is exact: every five-card hand and all 133,784,560 seven-card hands, counted.
The meters
Each $5 bet puts $1.00 (20%) on its jackpot meter. A 100% hit pays the whole meter and the house reseeds it at $50,000; a 10% hit takes a tenth of whatever is there. Nothing else ever empties a meter — there is no must-hit-by cap — so it grows until a hand hits it. Every cent is integer arithmetic on the server, applied in one atomic step per bet, so two bets that cross can never lose a contribution or pay one jackpot twice. If the network cannot be reached, a table keeps working against a meter of that device's own, labelled as such, and returns to the shared meters when it answers.
What is simulated
The money is play money and the seeds are put up by an imaginary house; many real casinos instead skim a hidden reserve from each bet to fund the reset, which is money you pay that the meter never shows. Only one unit is offered, and envy bonuses are not paid. The pay tables and the meter rules are real ones.