Is a roulette jackpot worth it? A straight answer by type of player

The value answer

No. A jackpot side bet takes 1% of your stake, returns less than that on average across all players, and in the case of Age of the Gods' RNG tables adds a 38th pocket that costs you another 2.56 points on every spin. A plain European table returns 97.30%; the jackpot tables return less, and the difference is the price of a stake-weighted lottery ticket with unpublished odds. Nobody who plays roulette for the roulette should be paying it.

The entertainment answer

Sometimes. A visible pool in the hundreds of thousands changes the texture of a session, and for some players that is worth a few pounds an hour on top of the cost of the wheel. The key is to know it is a surcharge, size it, and pay it deliberately. At 1% of stakes, an hour of £2 bets at 60 spins is £1.20 into the pool. That is the price of being in the draw for that hour. If it is worth that to you, it is worth it.

The odds of ever seeing it

Trigger rates are not published, but the record tells you something: the largest Age of the Gods roulette win was one event in 2017 across an entire network of players. Pots are won, and the game screens show recent winners, but any individual player at ordinary stakes should expect the bonus game to be something they read about rather than enter. Playing for it as a goal is the wrong frame. Playing with it running in the background is the right one.

How to play the opt-in tables sensibly

On Dragon Jackpot Roulette the toggle is yours. A reasonable pattern:

• Toggle off by default. You are then at a standard single-zero table.
• Toggle on for a fixed stretch when a pot is large and you want to be in it: 50 spins, small stake, then off again.
• Never raise the stake because the toggle is on. The contribution scales with the stake and so does everything else.
• Treat the contribution as spent the moment it is deducted.

On Age of the Gods RNG tables there is no toggle, so the choice is made by sitting down. If you want the jackpot chance, play it at a stake you would be happy to pay 5% on. If you do not, the plain Playtech European table has the same layout and the standard 37 pockets.

When to switch it off

When the pool has just been won and reseeded, when you notice you are betting more than you planned to "stay in the draw", and whenever the session was supposed to be about roulette. The toggle is the jackpot tables' best feature; use it in both directions.

The one-line version

Jackpot roulette is a plain wheel plus a lottery ticket, and the ticket costs about 1% of stakes on the opt-in tables and considerably more on the built-in ones. Buy it on purpose or not at all.