Vegas has created a lot of millionaires over the years, and it’s also broken its fair share of players. Whilst blackjack tables and poker tables are popular, offering a low house edge, you can’t win a fortune in the blink of an eye, which is why the progressive slots will always be the biggest lure in the City of Sin.
But who has landed the biggest jackpots, what are the biggest slot machine wins in Vegas history?
1. Most of us wouldn’t even consider putting $100 into a slot machine, but that’s what one software engineer did in 2003, and he was rewarded for the risk with a jackpot of just under $40 million. The slot machine he won his money on was a Megabucks machine, which was in the Excalibur casino, a machine that would go down in history for providing the biggest win to date.
2. In the summer of 2000, cocktail waitress Cynthia Jay-Brennan won close to $35 million on a Megabucks machines, which would be the biggest win until it was eclipsed three years later. This is a story of both good luck and bad luck though, because after scooping the jackpot Cynthia married her long-time boyfriend and then, just a few weeks later, she was rear-ended by a drunk driver. Her sister, a passenger in her car, died in the crash and Cynthia lost the use of her legs.
3. Two years prior to Cynthia Jay-Brennan’s story, a Megabucks machine paid out around $27.5 million when a retired flight attendant put $300 in, and scooped the first $20 million+ Megabucks jackpot. What’s astonishing about this big win is that the lucky player had previously scooped over three-quarters of a million dollars from another slot machine.
4. Californian resident Johanna Huendl was 74 when she scooped a Megabucks jackpot in 2002, giving herself over $22 million with which to make her remaining years considerably more comfortable. Initially, Johanna had misread the payout screen and thought she had won $2 million, which she was very happy with, so you can imagine her delight when she discovered that the actual jackpot was ten times higher than that.
5. To date, all of the big winners on this list played with fairly big amounts, from $100 to $500. This is beyond the realms of many players who play in single dollars and tens of dollars and wouldn’t dream of betting hundreds. However, in 1999, a $21 million jackpot went to a player who had just $10 to play with, and won the jackpot with his very first spin. The 49 year old was a businessman from Illinois, scooping the jackpot at Caesars on a Megabucks machine.
6. After winning around $4.5 million in 1989, 92 year old Elmer Sherwin was in for a repeat success in 2005, when he beat the odds and scooped a second jackpot, this time pocketing $21 million at the Cannery Casino in the north of Las Vegas.