It’s change over time for the bookies. No more are stakes of £100 allowed on roulette, or up to £50 on the slots. Everything is now a more reasonable (compared to jackpot size) £2. Which begs the question; what happened to all of the progressive cashpot money?
A progressive cashpot is the jackpot on slots that is awarded via a pot. The most obvious example is Rainbow Riches Pots of Gold which has three cashpots; bronze, silver and gold. These cashpots progress as money is played through them, and the RTP % (return to player) is calculated to include the money that is deducted from the stake which goes into increasing these cashpot sizes.
Many of the slot machines that had stake options of £10+, and some roulette games had cashpots which have since been wiped away when the change of stake occurred. So who got that money, and where did it go?
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If we look at a single example, this time using Rainbow Riches Pure Gold. On stakes of £10+ the cashpots start at £25 for bronze, £100 for silver and a £500 fixed value for gold, anything over these amounts is paid for by the players in the form of a deduction from the RTP (usually 12p in the pound). If you load up the slot machine and the cashpots are on £75, £190 and £500 respectively, that means that £50 and £90 has been paid for by previous players for a future event where other players will win one of those amounts. When the stake deduction occurred, these values were simply wiped away. In this small example £140 has been wiped off.
If we do some maths, there are four Rainbow Riches Pure Golds in every Coral betting shop, and 1,800 Coral’s in the UK. The cashpot example above wasn’t an exaggeration, so we can multiple the £140 by four, then times it by the number of Coral shops; 1,800 and we get a massive £1,008,00! That is from just one slot machine in one chain of betting shops. More extreme examples include Key Bet Roulette (not the 5p version). These were housed in both Ladbrokes and Coral’s fixed odds betting terminals and often had a single cashpot that was between £100 and £250, but it could reach up to £500 before it was won. The base value (starting value) of these was £25, anything above this amount was paid for by the players. If we take an average of £125 per game, that is £100 on every fixed odds betting terminal in every Coral and Ladbrokes betting shop. The maths gives us £400 per shop multiplied by 3,900 (1,800 Coral and 2,100 Ladbrokes). £400 multiplied by 3,900 gives us £1,560,00.
These are just two examples, the list of slot machines and roulette games with progressive cashpots which have been wiped away is considerably large and includes Centurion, Extra Bet Roulette, Multiple Rainbow Riches Games, Lucky 8 Roulette and many many others.
I had to speculate on the values as it’s impossible to know in each and every shop, but with 32,956 fixed odds betting terminals in the UK, you can be reasonably certain that the money wiped away exceeds £10,000,000.